Louisa and Henry Lawson chronology 1900-1909

Copyright © Pip Wilson, 2007

Blue denotes Henry's addresses on mail (from Roderick 1970) or from other sources.
Red denotes uncertainty, eg date or fact.  Pink denotes items placed for chronological context, etc.

Reviews, mentions and link-backs very much appreciated: http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/lawsons/lawson_chronology.html

Lawsons chronology up to 1889 and Henry Lawson news

Lawsons chronology 1890-1894  Lawson chronology 1895-1899

Lawsons chronology 1900-1909  Lawsons chronology 1910 and on

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Fairy Bower, Sydney, where Henry Lawson tried to commit suicide on December 6, 1902

1900

1900 in literature

January 1-March 31: Chaplin Cottage, Charles St, N Sydney
April 7-12: C/- T Metcalf, Woonona, Bulli, NSW
April 20: C/- SS Damascus, to England
July-September: 'Spring Villa', Cowper Rd, Harpenden, Hants, UK

Australian delegates in London witnessed the Royal Assent and proclamation of the Commonwealth. 

Western Australia joined the Commonwealth. 

Lord Hopetoun was officially appointed as first Governor-General.

Old-age Pensions instituted (NSW).   Source

"As Federation Day approached, we know that most people cooked their meals on fuel stoves, though gas was becoming popular. There was no refrigeration, though people used ice to cool things. Most people ate a lot of chops, steaks and sausages, boiled potato, boiled cabbage, and peas that were boiled into a mushy mess. Tomato sauce was becoming really popular in 1900, and meals were usually washed down with a cup of tea or beer."   Source

"Kalevan Kansa, Gulf of Carpentaria, 1900 
Matti Kurikka, a socialist journalist from Finland sought to establish a commune with 78 followers. 27 of the male Finnish utopians lived communally in a canvas camp near Chillagoe, as they cut railway sleepers and thence to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Collapsed by July 1900. One of the Finnish ex-utopians: 'Kurikka liked women, and women liked him – but their husbands had different ideas about it, and the confused love affairs caused much friction.
  "Kurikka: 'Persons who live together should be discouraged from having sexual relations with each other [and] the father of a child should be a man who has not resided with the mother'."   Source

Holy City, Kyneton, 1900
"Plymouth Brethren from England under the leadership of Dr Dalziel, a retired physician from Edinburgh. The 16 room mansion Ermstowe was the community centre at Holy City.
  "Dr Dalziel left Kyneton for Jerusalem in 1909 where he died awaiting the 2^nd coming and the community dissipated."   Source

"From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality" by Bill Metcalf, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995.
"Communes in Rural Australia" by Margaret Munro-Clark, Hale & Ironmonger, Sydney, 1986.
"A Peculiar People" by G. Souter, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1981.
"Paradise Mislaid, In Search of the Australian Tribe of Paraguay", by Anne Whitehead, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1997.

Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim ran for fourteen instalments in Blackwood's Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900, with Conrad completing the text of the serial version in July 1900. Heart of Darkness was also serialised in Blackwood's between 1899 and 1900.

Victor Daley was Australia's best-selling poet, according to one source.

William Butler Yeats became head of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he joined in 1890. Yeats's association with Golden Dawn led to clashes with 'The Beast', Aleister Crowley, whom he detested.

January - May: William Lane worked in Auckland briefly on the New Zealand Herald, and in January-March accepted an invitation from the AWU to become the Sydney Worker's first full-time editor. John Norton, front page in Truth, railed against him and warned him against coming to do that job, and if he did, not to "shake things up". "You may be liable to befool and bamboozle the blunder-headed donkeys who are responsible for running some of the unions, but, make no mistake, the prevailing New South Wales opinion about you is that you would be more fittingly placed in a horse-pound or a lunatic asylum than in an editor's chair." However, Lane resigned after three months, mainly because he had lost touch with the labour movement, which was now questioning illegal strikes, and growing more imperialistic. His employers supported the Boer War as well. By June he was back at the New Zealand Herald.

January 31: Louisa Lawson was thrown from a tram (having taken it from the Dawn office in George St, to Circular Quay where she was alighting, when it lurched) and suffered severe spinal injuries, from which she never fully recovered. Dr Hall found she had abrasions and dislocated knees. He called in Dr Iza Coghlan. Louisa complained of agonizing pain at the back of head and in neck. two days later she suffered a nervous collapse, bedridden for almost a year. Gertrude ran Dawn.

January: Boer War: "The First Contingent ... left for South Africa in November 1899 as the 1st Queensland Mounted Infantry - 14 Officers and 248 men. The 2nd Q. M. F. followed them in January 1900, with 10 Officers and 144 men and in March by the 3rd Q. M. F with 14 Officers and 302 men. These units had been raised from the ranks of the citizen military forces. The Queensland Defence Force, under the Defence Act of 1884, which has been described as the first homogeneous defence scheme formulated by any of the Colonies, then totalled 3000 including 19 officers. They had had a mixed role in South Africa and the jingoistic Australian Press although quite respectable, had puffed up their exploits. The First QMI arrived in Table Bay on 13 December 1899 in the period known as the ' black week' when the successive British defeats at Stormburg, Magersfontein and Colenso had left the British public stunned at the 2700 casualties. They went on to join Lord Methuan's force on the Orange River at what was the end of the first phase of the war. They took part in many of the engagements in 1900 - the advance to the Modder River, Poplar Grove and others. They came home to a rapturous welcome in December, 1900 and more arrived in January in time to lend the weight of the patriotic fervour of their welcome in the streets to the appeal of the recruiting efforts for the Fifth Contingent. Essentially the war was over in terms of headline making battles and sieges. What was left was the hard grind of chasing the Commandos led by Botha, De Wet, Smuts, Viljoen et al., across the veldt and up and down South Africa, where the final Australian Contingents did good, if largely unspectacular work."   Source

January 18: Death of Adolphus George Taylor.

January 24 - 27: A Premiers' Conference was held in Sydney to consider Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain's invitation of December 22, 1899. "Delegation arranged. All six colonies sending delegates – the WA man as a sort of 'outrider'. WP Reeves (NZ) was in London and could watch New Zealand's interests."   Source

January 27: Boxer Rebellion: Foreign diplomats in Peking, China demanded that the Boxer rebels be disciplined. "In support of British forces in China, the NSW, Victorian and South Australian governments sent an Australian Naval Contingent of 560 volunteers who performed mainly garrison duties around the port of Tientsin."   Source

February 11: Bertha Lawson was born to Henry Lawson and Bertha. Soon after, Bertha recounts, she got a knock at the door and Henry's maternal grandfather Harry Albury was standing there. She had never met him before. He looked at the baby and while Bertha went to make a cup of tea, he disappeared.

March: "The Bubonic plague struck Sydney in March,1900, and the Sydney Harbour Trust was set up to clean up the rat-infested wharves in the Rocks. Circular Quay had been modernised in 1890-1897, and the new Pyrmont Bridge opened in 1902. There were 21 breweries in Sydney in 1901, but 16 of them were closed down after 1901, by tough brewing regulations."   Source   Clean-up by City authorities, eg Batson's lane off Sussex Street. Thousands of rats killed. The government resumed areas around The Rocks and Darling Harbour, with the intention of demolishing them and rebuilding them. Part of the area was demolished, but redevelopment plans were stalled by the outbreak of World War I. 

March: Around now, both Lord Beauchamp (Governor of NSW) gave money to Henry Lawson to travel to England, on his request. David Scott Mitchell the same (50 pounds). Henry's publishers and others also contributed.

April 5: Conference at Colonial Office under Joseph Chamberlain. All seven Colonies represented for part of the discussion. 

April 16:

To Miles Franklin
Bulletin Office, [Sydney]
16th April 1900.
Dear Miss Franklin
Only just back from country.
Shall I take it with me to England? If I take story "home" send me a formal permission to "place" the work as I think fit. Also some latitude in editing in case English publishers want some paragraphs "toned down". You can trust me for the rest. If I take it I must have your authority to get it published in best form I can - that is, a margin for compromising with publishers' prejudices. All the same, I'd fight to have every line published as written. Good-bye and good luck. Don't despond.
Yours faithfully,
Henry Lawson

April 17: On the Track published by Angus & Robertson according to the contract of August 27, 1898.

“‘On the Track’ and ‘Over the Sliprails’ were both published at Sydney in 1900, the prefaces being dated March and June respectively—and so, though printed separately, a combined edition was printed the same year (the two separate, complete works were simply put together in one binding); hence they are sometimes referred to as ‘On the Track and Over the Sliprails’. The opposite occurred with ‘Joe Wilson and His Mates’, which was later divided into ‘Joe Wilson’ and ‘Joe Wilson’s Mates’ (1901).”   Source

April 19 - 21: "Premiers' Conference, Melbourne, to consider messages from Chamberlain and from Australian delegates. The New Zealand requests for amendments (notably that door should be left open to come in later on 'original States terms if she got round to seeing virtue (or advantage) in joining)."   Source

April 19: Lawson had a busy day in Sydney making last-minute preparations for his departure for the UK. Miles Franklin at Bangalore, NSW, wrote the following letter in response to Henry's of the previous day asking for permission to act as her temporary literary agent in London.

19th April:
To Henry Lawson, Esq.,
Dear Sir,
Please take my MS story entitled 'My Brilliant(?) Career' to England with you. I trust you to do your best for me in the matter and desire you to use your own discretion in the choice of a publisher and in the style of publishing. Should the publisher object to some of the sentiments expressed in the above mentioned manuscript story, you have my authority for a little latitude in the editing thereof, provided it meets with your approval. I am
Sir
Faithfully yours,
S.M.S. Miles Franklin."

Miles Franklin - correspondence with Henry Lawson, 1899 - 1902

April 20: On a Friday, the Lawsons set sail from Dalgety's Wharf, Millers Point for England on the SS Damascus, Captain McKilliam. Decision not yet reached at Angus and Robertson about Miles Franklin's novel as George Robertson had not had time to read it and his secretary Shenstone was not too impressed.

April 22 - 24: Henry Lawson sat for his portrait by John Longstaff. "Jules François Archibald, then editor of the Bulletin, commissioned John Longstaff to paint a portrait of the poet Henry Lawson. Apparently Archibald was so pleased with the portrait that he decided to 'write his name across Sydney' by bequeathing money to the arts. When he died in 1919 he left one tenth of his estate of £89,061 in trust for a non-acquisitive annual art prize to be awarded by the Trustees of the (then) National Art Gallery of New South Wales (now the Art Gallery of New South Wales)."   Source

April-June: As the Damascus entered various ports in Cape Town, Italy, etc, Lawson (who had been on the wagon for some time) went on drinking sprees with other passengers. Nelson Illingworth's father met the Lawsons at the docks in London and took them to his terrace house in City Road, where they stayed two weeks. Here, Henry burned a great mass of manuscripts (complete and incomplete) and newspaper clippings that he had brought with him (his portfolio of work). The Metropolitan police, and a fire engine, attended the fire. He wrote later: "... the firemen got wild and laid a complaint. (It cost me something in drinks.)" He regretted the burning. Lawson went sight-seeing in London, trying to locate the paces in Dickens's works. 

During his first days in England, Henry, who had already promoted Miles Franklin's My Brilliant (?) Career to George Robertson in Australia, did the same with British publishers, even when he had trouble placing his own work, and tried to interest JB Pinker (his agent) in the book. (It was published in January, 1901 by the Scottish firm William Blackwood and Sons.)

A Miles Franklin chronology   PDF   View as HTML

April 24: London's Daily Express was launched, the first national daily to put news on the front page. 

May: An unusual swarm of rats at Mokau, New Zealand that disappeared almost as suddenly as it had arrived.

May 14: Joseph Chamberlain introduced the federation Bill to Britain's House of Commons.

May 18: "The 4th Queensland Imperial Bushmen, the first of the Bushmen Contingents, left Australia by the transport "Manchester Port" on 18 May 1900, only three months after the meeting with the Premier referred to earlier. This Contingent had 26 Officers and 368 men - the drafts were getting larger."   Source

May 31: Boer War: British captured Johannesburg. During his stay in England, Henry Lawson was on the side of the Boers, even acting as an usher at a pro-Boer rally at the Albert Hall. Yet there are a couple of jingoistic Lawson poems against the Boers.   Boer War chronology

June 1: Dawn had a notice about Louisa Lawson's ill health.

June 5: Death of American author Stephen Crane, aged 28. His work was championed by Edward Garnett (1868 - 1937), who also championed Henry Lawson's at about this time.

June 9: Over the Sliprails by Henry Lawson was published by Angus & Robertson according to the contract of August 27, 1898.

June 28: Louisa Lawson was awarded £450 compensation for her injuries. She resumed editorship in early 1901.

"The accident led her to sue the tramway authorities, but the £450 she received in damages was poor consolation for the knowledge that her health and her general usefulness had been impaired. Like her son, she went round for years nursing a grievance that arose as much from her own temperament as from the circumstances and misadventures of her life.
  "The thing that really pulled her down, however, was the long wrangle with officialdom over the famous brass buckle for sealing mail-bags, which she had invented in 1896. Though the Postmaster-General's Department had approved and accepted her invention, the orders placed with her had been small and un-remunerative. Then Edward Nicol Murray, the man who had manufactured the first consignment of buckles to her specifications, infringed her patent and obtained a contract to supply 5,000 of the gadgets at a price of sixpence more per buckle than had been paid to Louisa.
  "The success of the suit she launched against Murray availed her little; for some reason the department failed to place further orders with her. With the help of the Women's Political and Social Reform League, she circulated a petition demanding 'justice,' and, in 1905, induced the Government 'to buy the remaining fasteners from her at barely the cost of manufacture.'"
"'This absurd case,' writes Sylvia Lawson (Nation 25 October 1958) 'was the end of Louisa'."   (Prout, 1963, p. 284)

July-September: A woman friend (Edith Dean, the widow of a former Bulletin writer, Francis Adams) of Bertha Lawson's found the Lawsons a furnished cottage ('Spring Villa', Cowper Rd) in Harpenden, Hertfordshire (population 4,500). After at first finding the locals rather stand-offish, the Lawsons soon made some friends, mostly from the middle class. Henry was looked down upon for not dressing formally as a rising author ought to do. His writing style became more formal, less "bush". (From Prout, Denton, Henry Lawson: The grey dreamer, Rigby Ltd, Adelaide, 1963. I'm searching for more info on Lawsons' UK stay. Chris the Genealogist from Hertfordshire is kindly helping and has put up this page with some answers for me, but perhaps you have some info to share as well.)

Harpenden & District Local History Society
78 Station Road, Harpenden, Herts. AL5 4TZ
Tel: 01582 713539

Harpenden Library    Hertfordshire Library    Historical pictures, Harpenden    Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village

Kelly's Directory of Hertfordshire, 1902    UK 1901 Census (pay per view)    Harpenden advertisements c. 1900

Pubs in Harpenden
"The coming of the railway in the 1840s caused Harpenden, previously a small agricultural village, to expand enormously. Hundreds of houses were built between 1880 and 1910, and in later years it became a substantial commuter dormitory town.

"A number of the pubs and inns had been in existence for many years ... in the High Street: the George (probably the oldest-documented pub, although its facade is Georgian); the Old Cock – black and white timbered, looks very old; the Cross Keys; the Railway Inn; the Oddfellows Arms, on Leyton Green just off the High Street. Along the Luton Road: the Old Bell, the Fox. In "South Down" (the other side of the railway Skew Bridge, on the way to Wheathampstead): The Rose and Crown, the Plough and Harrow, the Engineer, the Carpenters Arms. On the road to Batford: the Gibraltar Castle, the Malta. Cowper Road was part of a group of streets, developed up the hill, off Station Road, known as the "Poets" – there was also Tennyson Road, Milton Rd, etc."   Pub information kindly provided by Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies

Denton Prout records that, according to the unreliable source Bertha Lawson, Blackwood's made Henry an offer for a new book, and he was getting orders for work from the USA and elsewhere. But according to Prout, he was discontent. It might have been craving for drink, or a letter from Hannah Thornburn.

July 9: "Queen Victoria gives Royal Assent to Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, complete with compromise on Judicial Committee appeals, and five-year concession to Western Australia on customs duty uniformity should that Colony join up."   Source

July 17: Death of Orpheus Myron McAdoo, American Negro singer who toured Australia with McAdoo's American Minstrels and McAdoo's Alabama Cakewalkers. Earlier one of the troupe of Frederick J Loudin and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Buried in Waverley Cemetery.

"Following the first tour of the Georgia Minstrels,a number of other black troupes were to follow with an off-shoot of the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers arriving in Australia in 1886 & touring extensively throughout Australiasia [sic] with great success. From this first troupe of Fisk Jubilee Singers, Mr. O.M. McAdoo was to see the potential of future ventures & toured Australasia & Africa with his own jubilee & minstrel company over the proceeding years until his untimely death in Sydney on the 17th July,1900. His theatrical companies contained some of the best black minstrel acts as well as singers/musicians to ever appear in Australia, with such stars as William James Ferry (Ferry the frog), Billy McClain, Miss Flora Batson, C.W.Walker, Prof.Henderson Smith, etc. (Billy McClain originally came to Australia with M.B.Curtis's Afro- Americans). 

"F.J.Loudin's Fisk Jubilee Singers original tour spurned many derivative organisations besides the McAdoo troupe of jubilee singers with Huntley Spencer (former member of the Era Comedy Four with Hugo's American Minstrels) being associated with a troupe of Fisk jubilee singers as late as 1936 in New Zealand. Numerous Australian & New Zealand performers were to be in one of the many "Fisk Jubilee Singers" groups to have flourished following the visit of Loudin's Fisk Jubilee singers in 1886."  Source   More

July 31: Western Australia Referendum: a large majority (mainly from the goldfields) for the federation Act. 

August 13: William Blackwood wrote to Henry Lawson with an offer to republish While the Billy Boils. Lawson wrote to George Robertson asking him to take up Blackwood's offer.

c. September, October: Dawn moved from 402 George St back to 138 Phillip St because Louisa Lawson couldn't manage the stairs.

c. September: After about three months in Harpenden, Bertha Lawson was so emotionally ill she was admitted to a hospital in London and Henry moved there to be nearby. For the first few weeks he shared a flat in Gray's Inn Road with 'Arthur Maquarie' (formerly Arthur Macquarie Mullens), a writer who figured in Lawson's 'Letters to Jack Cornstalk' as a "Sydney University boy" boy whom he had known in Sydney and "came home about two years ago to make a living with his pen". In Argosy, 'Maquarie' had praised Lawson's work. The children went to a private home at Shepperton, some fifty kilometres up the Thames. The expense of maintaining the home at Harpenden on an uncertain income had been difficult enough. Now Lawson had to find Bertha's hospital fees and those for the children's board as well as his share of bed and board with Maquarie.

"[Lawson wrote to Blackwood]: 'Thank you for enquiries re Mrs Lawson. I am sorry to say that she is very ill—and the Doctors say she may take months to recover.'
  "Although at the outset Bertha had enjoyed the idyll of Harpenden, three months of village manners and concealment of short commons from prying eyes had worn her down. Lawson's overnight absences in London began to gnaw at her mind: fear of his lapsing into the old habits upset her. With the coming of autumn the leafless trees seemed to menace her. Rain and slush confined her to the house and multiplied Lawson's absences. She fancied that instead of attending to business affairs he was roystering with his new friends. 'Bohemia,' she wrote, 'with its trials and temptations, claimed him again.' She went on, 'To add to our troubles, I became very ill, suffering from insomnia, which ended in a complete breakdown. For months I was in hospital.'
  "So Lawson was obliged to write in a postscript to his letter: 'Kindly address c/- Pinker, as I am leaving Harpenden for London.'"
Roderick, Colin, Henry Lawson: a life, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1991

 

Important new information

Henry and family appear in the 1901 United Kingdom Census 

(Collected from Lawson's residence at Gray's Inn, presumably in 1900 at Arthur Maquarie's flat in Gray's Inn Road)

On February 12, 2006, we asked the question: "Who is Lizzie Humphrey?", because seven days earlier, my research colleague Ms Sylvia De Vanna of London had discovered for this Lawson Chronology, the following important information in the 1901 UK Census which seems not to be in Lawson biographies or previous research (please correct me if I'm wrong). Some questions arise:

Who is 25-year-old Lizzie Humphrey, servant from Harpenden? As far as I know she is not mentioned in Lawson biographies. If you have further information, I'd love to hear as it raises certain other questions: (1) might she be a paramour of Lawson's? Bertha Lawson soon after release from Bethlem Mental Hospital was claiming "unnameable brutality" that Henry was responsible for (though Mary Gilmore dismissed this as fantasy), and around now rumours (apparently started by Louise Mack but dismissed in The Bulletin by Lawson's flatmate Arthur Maquarie) were circulating in Sydney that Henry was unfaithful; (2) where was little Jim Lawson (born February 10, 1898)? Presumably with Mrs Brandt in Shepperton (see my entry below for May 14, 1901). So why did Henry have the baby Bertha (born February 11, 1900) with him (and a "servant") and not his toddler son; surely as a man of his generation he would rather take the boy than the baby; (3) Lawson was relatively poor at this stage and doubtless couldn't afford a servant as well as having his children boarded with Mrs Brandt at Shepperton, so was Lizzie Humphrey really a servant? Surely Henry's journalist mate Arthur Maquarie wasn't employing a servant, and it's interesting that Lizzie comes from Harpenden, where the Lawsons were living when Bertha first took ill; (4) where is Arthur Maquarie? Presumably moved out, another reason to doubt Lizzie is his servant; (5) This is pure conjecture, but perhaps if Henry was having an extramarital affair, he would take a baby with him but not a toddler who might "spill the beans" to Mother. This is conjecture, but it's curious, because as far as I know, Lizzie Humphrey has not been revealed in "Lawsonia" before this entry in this chronology. The existence of this cohabitation would perhaps have been hidden from all, but by law could not be hidden from the census takers. Moreover, the fact that the exact birth dates are not known in the census report suggests that the information was given to the census takers by some third party (a neighbour, perhaps – possibly no one was home when the census takers visited); Henry certainly would have known his own birthday and that of baby Bertha. It is possible that Henry did not even know this data was given to the government. He might have had a secret, and never even known that this info fell into the hands of history. What do you think? Does it partly answer this question posed by author Xavier Pons? –

"What sort of experience did he have in London that Mary Gilmore, who was a fairly close friend of his, felt she could not explicitly mention, and which may explain why that part of her records and memoirs is still gathering dust in the Mitchell Library, and access to it is denied to the public?"
Xavier Pons, Out of Eden: Henry Lawson’s Life and Works – A Psychoanalytic View, Sirius Books, an imprint of Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1984, p. 2

Name	Estimated Birth Year	Birthplace	Relationship	Civil Parish	County/Island
Lizzie Humphrey	abt 1875	Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England	Servant	St Andrew Holborn above the Bars and St George the Martyr	London
Betha [sic] Lawson	abt 1900	New South, Wales	Daughter	St Andrew Holborn above the Bars and St George the Martyr	London
Henry Lawson	abt 1867	New South, Wales	Head	St Andrew Holborn above the Bars and St George the Martyr	London

Humphrey family, Wheathampstead (near Harpenden)

 

(From ancestry.co.uk, a pay site)

Name:	Henry Lawson
Age:	34
Estimated birth year:	abt 1867
Relation:	Head
Household:	View other family members
Gender:	Male
Where born:	New South, Wales
Civil parish:	St Andrew Holborn above the Bars and St George the Martyr
Ecclesiatical parish:	Holy Trinity Grays Inn Road
Town:	Grays Inn
County/Island:	London
Country:	England
Street address:	View Image
Condition as to marriage:	View Image
Education:	View Image
Employment status:	View Image
Occupation:	View Image
Source information:	RG13/247
Registration district:	Holborn
Sub-registration district:	Holborn
ED, institution, or vessel:	13
Folio:	12
Page:	14 (click to see others on page)
Household schedule number:	129

Further Lizzie Humphrey information

Meg Tasker, a researcher with her colleague, Lucy Sussex, wrote to me on February 14 and 15, 2007 and provided further information. By coincidence, just five months after my research colleague Sylvia de Vanna discovered Lizzie Humphrey in the 1901 Census, so did Meg's research colleague, unaware that I had published on it. Meg points out Lawson's Triangles of Life and Other Stories (1907), and in particular 'III. The Little Man with the Smile', in which Lawson writes at length about 'Lizzie Higgins'. Meg Tasker writes that it "looks Lawson is trying to work through, or perhaps even convey something ... but what?"

"In mid-1900 Henry and Bertha Lawson went to stay in the village of Harpenden, urged to go there and looked after by Edith Dean, the Australian-born widow of radical poet Francis Adams. After Adams’s sensational suicide in 1893, Edith had stayed in England, and subsequently married an English landscape painter, Frank Dean; she had connections in radical and artistic circles in London, including anarchists and Fabians.

"Edith Dean’s role in the Lawson story has been understated in the existing records, partly because of the misattribution of a letter she wrote to J. F. Archibald in on 18 October 1900 (Mitchell Library, A.G. Stephens Papers). The hand-written transcription ends with the signature as Mrs G. H. Drake. Fortunately, the original letter has also survived (in the same Lawson scrapbook), so I have been able to check the hand-writing and signature. Having examined Edith Dean’s correspondence after the death of Francis Adams, I found it very easy to identify her as having written this letter, using its contents, style, hand-writing and, importantly, the postal address. Sent from her house in Harpenden, the letter begins:

"Dear Mr Archibald,
I know you will be dreadfully shocked to hear that poor Mrs Lawson has gone mad - driven so, I have no hesitation in saying, by her brutal husband. He has been drinking heavily and I quite expect that the shock of his taking to drink again has completely turned her brain.

"She goes on to describe his friendship with "a man who passes as Maquarie (an Australian, I don’t know his real name) – an abject ne’er-do-well' whom Lawson used to visit and go drinking with in London, 'leaving his poor little wife and her two babies to do as best they might'. According to Edith, after carousing with Maquarie in London, Henry would come home very late or in the small hours of the morning, 'kick up a row' and 'the poor little woman would come weeping to me'.

"Edith Dean’s account of what happened to cause Bertha’s breakdown is somewhat sensational. It is also at odds with the generally accepted version, which is that Lawson sent both of the children to be looked after by a woman in Shepperton, while he moved into lodgings in London with his new friend and colleague, Arthur Maquarie, later moving with Maquarie to a rural village called Charlton to be nearer the children.

"Edith’s letter to Archibald continues:

"Three weeks ago my husband and I left home for a holiday leaving a servant here. On our return we find Mrs Lawson in the County Lunatic Asylum [not quite correct – it was a private hospital – MT] and Lawson in lodgings with my servant and the children in London - and their home sold up.

"As well as accusing Henry of neglect and intemperance, Edith introduces a hint of scandal in the accusation that he had run off with Edith Dean’s own servant. However, I should add that Edith Dean was not the most reliable of witnesses. She herself had suffered some kind of periodic mental illness during her marriage to Francis Adams (1884 to 1890), and would spend the last years of her own life in asylums after separating from her second husband. Clearly, then, Edith’s allegations about the way Lawson treated his wife should be tested against other evidence, or at the very least we should consider alternative interpretations.

"Note: Edith Dean’s story is fascinating – she appears in my biography of Francis Adams (Meg Tasker, Struggle and Storm: The Life and Death of Francis Adams, MUP 2001), but has also been written about by George Bernard Shaw scholar Stanley Weintraub, in 'A Jennifer from Australia', Shaw’s People (Penn State Univ Press, 1996)."

September 6:

To Miles Franklin

Spring Villa,
Cowper Road,
Harpenden,
Herts,
England.
6th September 1900.
Dear Miss Franklin,
Just time for a line. I submitted your story to Blackwood's manager. He wrote me to come and talk it over; but, on consideration, I thought best to put the business into the hands of my agent Mr Pinker, who has set me on my feet. He'll get more money than we can, and look after your interests. Am writing for Blackwood myself. I enclose Pinker's agreement for your signature: it is the same as I signed. Sign it and return, and ante-date it to this month, as Pinker is already looking after your story. Will write directly I hear from Blackwood. Wife and children well. Am full of work.
Yours faithfully,
Henry Lawson

September 13: The Australian film made by the Salvation Army's innovative Limelight Department, Soldiers of the Cross, premiered in Melbourne – arguably the first feature film ever made. The presentation slides still remain, but the film is sadly lost. The Limelight department was established following the 1891 tour of Salvation Army founder General William Booth, to publicise that tour.

September 17: Queen Victoria proclaimed the federation Act and declares it operative from January 1, 1901. 

c. September 22: St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney was consecrated. "... according to some sensitive Protestants, Archbishop Redwood made some slightly critical remarks about Protestants. The Sydney Morning Herald, on the morning of 23 September 1900 came out with the headline, 'The Attack on Protestantism', and reported that an enormous gathering assembled in the Sydney Town Hall 'to protest against the attacks on Protestantism and vice-regal presence at the dedication of St. Mary's Cathedral.' By 7.30 pm, there were 6000 people at the protest."   Source

October:  "October 1900 proved to be the climactic month of Lawson's life. He was well aware of his maternal grandfather's eccentricity, of his Uncle Abel's aberrations and of his brother Charles's instability. He knew that his mother suffered fits of abstraction and melancholy. He had known nothing of Bertha's family history when he married her; now he had come face to face with the possibility that Bertha herself was unstable." (Roderick, 1991, pp 223 - 226)  Lawson wrote 'Babies in the Bush' this month "at white heat" (Roderick, 1991), and his agent James Pinker sold the story (in which a fictional woman becomes hysterical) to The Bulletin and Blackwood's Maga. Around now, William Blackwood, concerned about Lawson's distress vis a vis his and Bertha's health and financial problems, kindly offered to henceforth pay Lawson on acceptance rather than on publication, and sent a cheque for £22/10/- for 'A Double Buggy' (Double Buggy at Lahey’s Creek, A - Parts - I - II - III - IV) which was to appear in Maga in February, 1901. Meanwhile, Henry, helped by Maquarie, was busy revising Miles Franklin's My Brilliant (?) Career (as it was then still titled) for Blackwood's – "toning it down" for publication. Henry was also around now working hard and "mad with worry" on ''The House That Was Never Built' and 'Telling Mrs Baker' (involved hallucinatory themes) and '"Water Them Geraniums". Part I - Part II'.

October 13: Louisa Lawson's mail-bag legal case: Edward Nicol Murray picked up a sealed sample of the mail bag at Sydney GPO, with view to making a buckle. Believing she was secure with the 1896 patent, she took court action.

October 17:

To Henry Lawson, London
Bangalore
Oct 17th, 1900.
Dear Sir
Words of thanks are tame & flat in return for the trouble you take with me, but I wish you could understand how I feel your goodness. That you could bother about me so soon in the midst of all your own business & worry has wiped out a lot of my bitterness in one act.
England has not our genial climate so take care of yourself during the rigor of her winter. Remember Australia has but one Henry Lawson.
From the art world of London Australia must seem very crude & oh! so far away. The wattles are just done & the haze of summer is beginning to once more veil the hills as sunset. I enclose a few gum leaves & a sprig of wattle.
Dear Sir
Gratefully yours
Stella M S M Franklin

December: Cricketer Arthur Coningham divorce case commenced, and almost overshadowed Federation, it was such big news in Australia. It involved his wife Alice, and Rev. Dr Denis Francis O'Haran (corespondent). Paddy Crick was involved in the sordid case, improperly using his position as Postmaster-General (PMG) to intercept letters on behalf of his legal client. (Arthur Coningham returned to Australia and died in Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane in 1939.)

December 7: Angus & Robertson published Lawson's Verses Popular and Humorous; he sent copies to the UK to his Australian Book Company. In Australia it had mixed reviews. Alfred Stephens wrote "Lawson's wine here seems to be running perilously close to the lees" and "for the last three years his fame has been at a standstill".

Henry Lawson poems in 1900

Ballad of the Cornstalk
The Author's Farewell to the Bushmen
The Ballad of the Black-Sheep
The Rush to London
From the Bush

1901

1901 in literature

C/- JB Pinker, Effington House, Arundel Street, Strand, London, EC
[Paradise Row, Piccadilly]

Henry Lawson published two books, The Country I Come From and Joe Wilson and His Mates.

Harry Holland stood as a candidate for the Australian Senate and the state seat of Lang. He was standing for the Socialist Labor Party, having rejected the Labor Party as too moderate. He did not make any significant impression.

Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim was published, last (and thought by many to be the most important) of his Indian writings.   Source: Kipling chronology

Nobel prizes awarded for the first time. First Nobel Prize for Literature awarded.

"The Constitution denies citizenship, franchise and the right to military duty to Aboriginal People, Asians and Africans. Indigenous people are not included in any census nor regarded as citizens, thus excluding them from civil liberties like Commonwealth voting rights, unless, as in South Australia, they already have the vote in State elections. In Queensland and Western Australia Indigenous people are specifically excluded."   Source

Sydney and suburbs at federation
"The Rocks, Woolloomooloo, Balmain, Ashfield, Glebe, Leichhardt, Newtown, Paddington, and Redfern were all overcrowded, unhealthy and filled with poor and unemployed. Alexandria, Annandale, Arncliff, Darlington, Eveleigh, Pyrmont, St. Peters were also working-class suburbs.
  "Burwood and Bondi were 'Gentlemen's residences', Ashfield was 'residential', Darling Point and Double Bay were 'fashionable', Canterbury was still a scattered area featuring large houses in extensive grounds, Elizabeth Bay, Pott's Point, Rushcutter's Bay, Gladesville, Point Piper, Rose Bay and Strathfield had 'large houses surrounded with beautifully laid out grounds'. Flemington and Homebush were very scattered and Rookwood and Auburn were still officially 'in the country'. The North Shore was still mostly virgin bushland, with North Sydney, Manly and Mosman settled."   Source

"26.63% of Sydney children under the age of five would die, 20.9% of these before their first birthday. In the suburbs, it was worse: 35.2% of those under 5, 25.94% in their first year. Many Sydney graveyards show this - graves with a lamb, a broken column or a cherub on them. If you survived babyhood, tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria and whooping cough were the big killers. If you had to go to hospital, there were 13 hospitals in Sydney, and a leper colony at Little Bay. By 1900, men could expect to live till 52, and women till 56 ... The four major religions were Church of England (46.58%), Roman Catholic (25.96%), Methodist (10.24%), and Presbyterian (9.91%). Most people in Sydney attended church every Sunday. The Church of England had about 620,000 members, and 106,000 attended every Sunday. Catholics had 347,000 and 109,000 attended every Sunday. Methodists had 137,600 members with 85,700 attending every Sunday, and Congregationalists had 24,831 members with 13,525 every Sunday ... Gangs of 'young larrikins' hung around causing trouble in the gas-lit streets of Sydney after dark. They belonged to the 'Glebe Push', the 'Rocks Push' or the 'Argyle Cut Push'. They are described as having 'slouch hats on the back of their heads, greasy curls, no collar or waistcoat, a bright handkerchief around their necks, an overhanging shirt, and tight trousers.' They were mostly young unemployed males. Their girlfriends wore very colourful clothes: favouring colours such as purple, puce, violet, scarlet and emerald green, frequently mixed together. They wore ostrich feathers draped over their straw hats. They wore high lace-up boots coming almost to the knee. often embroidered with designs and mottoes. They apparently wore shorter skirts than was fashionable with 'respectable' people. In 1890, only 3.1% of tobacco smoked was cigarettes. In 1904 this had jumped to 11.1%., but only the most 'modern' of women smoked."   Source

What was the price of food like in 1901?

"Soon, statistician T.A. Coghlan ... churned out figures - like those in The Seven Colonies (1901) - to show how remarkably cheap living was in our paradise. For instance, of an average annual expenditure per inhabitant of £36 19s 5d, he found that only £15 15s 7d went on food and drink - that is , only 37.5 per cent. In Great Britain, the figure was 42.2% and in Germany 49.1%. As for the annual consumption of meat, while the average in Great Britain was 109 lbs and in America 150 lbs, in Australia it was 264 lbs. This was four times as much as in Germany and ten times as much as in Italy.
  "An inquiry by the Commonwealth statistician in 1910-11 found that the average spent on food had fallen to 29.3%, while percentages in other leading industrial nations were between 54% and 60%. 'It is not unlikely,' the government investigator considered, 'that expenditure on food alone furnishes a true indication of the standard of material well-being.' And so, Australia, with the world's cheapest food, came to be thought of as enjoying the world's highest 'standard of living'."
Michael Symons, One Continuous Picnic, A History of Eating in Australia, 1982 p. 60   Source

Industrial Arbitration Act was passed to regulate work hours and wages, but women still only received 50% of the male wage.   Source

Population of Sydney 481,830.

The Thornburns moved to 19 Railway Avenue, Malvern.

British trade union activist Tom Mann, a colleague of Henry Hyde Champion, emigrated to Australia to see if that country's broader electoral franchise would allow more "drastic modification of capitalism". Settling in Melbourne he was active in Australian trade unions and became an organiser for the Australian Labor Party. However, he grew disillusioned with the party, believing it was being corrupted by the nature of government and concerned only with winning elections. He felt that the federal Labour MPs were unable and unwilling to change society, and their prominence within the movement was stifling and over-shadowing organised labour. He resigned from the ALP and founded the Victoria Socialist Party.

January: Thanks to Henry Lawson's championing of her novel, Miles Franklin's My Brilliant (?) Career was accepted for publication by the Scottish firm William Blackwood and Sons.

January 1: The British colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia federated as the Commonwealth of Australia. Edmund Barton became first Prime Minister. The first Governor-General (Lord Hopetoun), in the presence of first Commonwealth Cabinet, inaugurated the Commonwealth at Centennial Park, Sydney.   More

"[WG] Spence served in the Commonwealth Parliament as a Labor member from 1901. He was Post-Master General in 1914-1915. According to some in the AWU, the Prime Minister Billy Hughes tricked Spence into supporting conscription in 1916/1917. For his support of Hughes Spence was expelled from the Party, serving as a Nationalist member until his defeat in the 1919 election. Unlike others, the AWU did not expel Spence. Rather, it asked him to resign from the union in 1917."   Source

January 1: Death of Ignatius Donnelly.

January 10: Blackwood received from Lawson his revised version of Franklin's My Brilliant (?) Career, plus Lawson's own 'The Story of the Oracle'.

January 19: Paddy Crick had concluded negotiations with Murray over Louisa Lawson's mail-bag clasp. He wrote a memo that EN Murray should be requested to make 5,000 of his clasps. Louisa Lawson found out a day or two later. Wyndham Davies, who had been fighting within the PM-G for months on behalf of Louisa's mailbag clasp, visited her to inform her what was going on.

January 22: Death of Queen Victoria. Her eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, Prince of Wales became King, reigning as King Edward VII. His son, Prince George, Duke of York became Duke of Cornwall (later King George V).

January 24: Louisa Lawson wrote a letter to Stephen Harbord Lambton of the PM-G demanding her rights, also threatening that if pushed, she would make known to members of the press (who in the past had asked) about certain "things highly discreditable to the Department".

January 27: King Edward VII of the United Kingdom appointed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (1859 - 1941) a field marshal in the British army, on Wilhelm's 42^nd birthday.

January 29: Blackwood bought Franklin's My Brilliant Career. Even after Lawson's "toning down", Blackwood reserved the right to tone it down more, in consultation with Lawson.

January - February: Louisa Lawson sometime around now attacked her daughter, Gertrude, breaking her arm. Gertrude, aged about 24, left home. It was probably around January or February because in February Louisa wrote an editorial in Dawn, pointedly about filial duty. 

February: Blackwood's magazine published Henry's 'A Double Buggy at Lahey's Creek', which was described by his mentor, the eminent critic/editor/author Edward Garnett (1868 - 1937), as taking readers "absolutely inside people's lives" in a way unachievable even by De Maupassant. Henry was published in Blackwood's, Cassell's and Chambers's magazines. By February, says Roderick (1991), Henry Lawson realised that his wife's mental/emotional problems were severe.

February - April: "In a desperate attempt to pay the bills, Lawson dug out some sketches that he had brought to England and converted old ballads into sketches, such as 'The Little World Left Behind', 'The Golden Graveyard', 'The Bush Fire, 'Jimmy Grimshaw's Wooing' and 'The Ghostly Door', which Pinker sold to second-rank periodicals, such as the Argosy, Black and White, the Outlook and the Onlooker.
  "Lawson was now working along three lines: first, he was trying to complete the stories needed for the series intended for Blackwood; secondly, he was getting a number of separate stories on paper for Pinker to sell to other magazines; thirdly, he was revising his own stories for imminent volume and toning down My Brilliant Career. Undoubtedly he' would have mastered all of these but for the fear that Bertha's condition might prove to be chronic. His anxiety played havoc with his own constitution, the severity of the London winter depressed him and he was living for the day when he could take Bertha and the children home to Australia." (Roderick, 1991)

February 1: Lambton replied to Louisa Lawson: "referring to your communication of the 24^th ultimo, relative to the mail-bag fasteners in this Department, I am directed by the Postmaster-General to inform you that, in view of the threats made by you therein, he will not have any further transactions with you."

February 6: Miles Franklin appointed Henry's Lawson's agent James B Pinker as her own.

About February 19: Pinker sent Blackwood, and Blackwood accepted for Maga, 'The House That Was Never Built', "in June or July".

About February 12: Blackwood had more good news for Henry Lawson: he would publish in Maga 'The Babies in the Bush' in April and 'Past Carin'' in May. He rejected '"Water Them Geraniums". Part I - Part II' but said he might want it in the forthcoming book. Lawson received at once £39, "more than half of which went on Bertha's hospital fees and the children's board" (Roderick, 1991, p. 227).

March: At Villarrica (near Cosme), Paraguay, Larry Petrie jumped onto the line to push a child out of the path of an on-coming train and was killed himself. His body was claimed by Rose Summerfield.   Source

March: "Nicholas Eugene Coxon, with the same objective [as Gilbert Probyn-Smith, mid-year, 1899], produced 20 issues of an illustrated weekly newspaper. It is doubtful if the history of English pamphleteering, even in the golden age of verbal assassination and vituperation, the 18^th century, offers anything to compare with the bound file of The Jury which may be inspected by the curious in the Mitchell Library. It had a complex genesis.
  "Coxon was a compositor on Truth in the days of A. G. Taylor, and graduated by way of proof-reading to journalism. He remained on Truth through its many mutations, and in 1900, when Norton [John Norton] was completely in control, started the associated sporting paper, The Sportsman.
  "In March 1901, an election was held for the Federal Senate, and Norton, who had set his heart on entering Commonwealth politics, was defeated by a small majority. His reaction was the usual one; he plunged into a drinking bout which lasted some months. His wife, who had left him two or three times because of his brutality, had just been persuaded to return to him. Norton began quarrelling with her again, and accused her of committing adultery with Coxon. He repeated the charge, which was quite without justification, to many people, and Coxon issued a writ against him claiming £1,000 for slander. To meet this, Norton, by promise and threats—he picked up her baby and threatened to dash its brains out—induced her to sign a confession of misconduct with Coxon.
  "That night, as a public demonstration of their reconciliation, he took her, after a heavy dinner, to hear Madame Sapia in Rjgoletto, and encountering Coxon in the dress circle, hit him violently from behind. There was a 'terrible scene'. The ushers pulled three or four men off Coxon, and Norton and his wife left the theatre hurriedly.
  "Three days later, Mrs. Norton signed a statutory declaration that her confession was extorted from her by force, and that there had never been any impropriety between herself and Coxon. Probably unaware of this, Norton filed a divorce petition against her, naming Coxon as co-respondent, but was persuaded by his solicitor to drop it. Coxon then dropped his action for slander, Norton paying his costs in both cases. But Coxon had decided to bring out a paper 'to explain the whole thing' ... The first sale of the paper was over 30,000 copies ...
  "In between drinks and domestic brawls ... Norton paid a visit to Melbourne. He was planning a Melbourne edition of Truth and arranged a public meeting to promote it. It was held in the Temperance Hall. Norton's name was familiar to Melburnians, but few had seen or heard him. The citizens who filled the hall were dazzled by his pyrotechnics as he assailed Kings, Governors and politicians."   (Pearl, 1958, pp 165-6)

On his return to Sydney, Norton attacked his wife through the pages of Truth, with headlines such as: 'John Norton's 'Appy 'Ome', 'A Wife's Written Confessions of Misconduct', 'She Still Colleagues With Coxon', 'Ada Norton Charges Her Husband With Having Committed a Bestial Crime'. He even printed her replies to his charges.

March 15: Blackwood's returned to James Pinker Lawson's MS of The Heart of Australia. They had been unable to sell Joe Wilson and His Mates and were not interested. Bertha was getting depressed again, just as Lawson was getting broke. Methuen took the book (which they called Children of the Bush) on the advice of Edward Garnett, and Henry dedicated it to his wife. However, her hallucinations reappeared. Methuen had HG Wells, A Conan Doyle and Henry James in their stable; Henry could not capitalise due to home difficulties and perhaps insufficient talent. His predicament was that Bertha obviously needed to get home for her mental health, but he needed to be in UK for any chance at success.

March 17: A showing of 71 Vincent van Gogh paintings in Paris, 11 years after his death, created a sensation.

March 22: "With Maquarie away [Lawson] was going mechanically about his business, neglecting his diet, absorbed in the world of his creation. In a cable dispatch to Truth dated London March 22, in her 'Lights of London' column, Maude Wheeler wrote: 'And ever the singers, scribblers and painters come to inartistic London, and are lost in the vast maelstrom of her great dinginess ... Pessimistic Lawson is here, buried in a dull London flat, all alone. His wife craved and longed always for the sunshine of her native Australia, and is now in a mad-house, while her husband wanders about London and lives nobody knows how.'"   (Roderick, 1991, p. 229)

March 23: John Norton was operated on for a mastoid abscess at St Clair's Private Hospital, Brisbane and remained in that city for some weeks. At this time, he had bodyguards (henchmen) named Fred Parkes, Edward 'Duffy' Morris and Digby Grand (who in about 1902 was imprisoned for the murder of Constable Long at Auburn). (Pearl, 1958)

March 28: Sir John See (Progressive Party) succeeded William Lyne, Protectionist, as Premier of NSW.

April: Reviews in UK of Verses Popular and Humorous were generally very poor.

April 8: Henry "wrote from Pinker's office to Blackwood apologising for delay in returning the proofs of My Brilliant Career; he wanted Maquarie to go through the story. His postscript said: 'Am at work on a longish story 'Peter McLaughlan, Bush Missionary' which I fancy will be strongest of series submitted to you. After this I hope to get well on a novel I have on hand and which I would like published serially.'
  "The coming of spring brought some cheerfulness, ushered in with a letter from Blackwood thanking him and Maquarie for the 'careful revision' of My Brilliant Career. Blackwood was sorry to hear that he had been in continued ill health. "I had hoped you had improved," he wrote, "I can understand only too well how much you must have felt our winter, and I trust a return to the more genial clime of Australia will prove beneficial'".   (Roderick, 1991, p. 228)

May 9: Federation ceremony – the Duke of York (later King George V) opened the First Commonwealth Parliament in the temporary capital (Melbourne). The Salvation Army's innovative Limelight Department filmed the main ceremony in Melbourne, producing what is arguably the world's first documentary film. 

"In May 1901, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, (later King George V and Queen Mary) came to Melbourne to open the first Federal Parliament. The royal visit confirmed Australia's links with Britain, and transformed a potentially dull political event into a grand ceremonial and festive occasion."   Source   Pictures   Chronology of the Australian Federation Movement, 1883 - 1901   More    More

May 13: In a letter (apparently misdated May 15, says Roderick, 1991) Lawson wrote to Angus & Robertson glowing over his prospects in England, but says "Have been an invalid for the last six months", but "Mrs Lawson's health improving". It is not known whether he had really been very ill or if it was an excuse for his neglect.

May 14: Bertha Lawson admitted to Bethlem Royal Hospital in Lambeth Road after she tried to kill herself by plunging into the Thames, having scaled the wall of the hospital she was already in. (She was discharged exactly three months later on August 14.)

"Residence Harpenden. First attack? No. Age on first attack: 19. Duration of existing attack 10 days.

"Supposed cause: Lactation and worry. [I suppose this is the Victorian version of post-partum depression?]

"Suicidal? Yes. [It looks like 'no' has been altered to Yes] Relatives insanity? Yes, mother and sister.

"A 'first medical certificate' of 3 October 1900 refers to information given by a Florence Pope. 'Her husband Henry Lawson tells me his wife attempted to get out of the upstairs window. Has begged him to kill her or give her the means to kill herself'.

"A '2nd medical certificate' of 8 October. 'She is very depressed and taciturn'. A further reference to Florence Pope of '123 New Bond Street London'. I cannot read the word after this, but it could be 'nurse'. Both certificates signed I think by a 'William Henry Blake' presumably a doctor.

"Clinical notes: Face assumes an expression of terror at times ... cries constantly ... very timid. She was quite terrified at the vibrations of a tuning fork which was placed by her ear ... imagines that she is going into everlasting punishment which says she deserves ... that she has killed her children through her cowardly attempt in trying to destroy herself ... July 10 Is much better mentally ...

"August 14 Discharged recovered."
These note by courtesy of Peter Morton, Flinders University, who examined the hospital records. Peter writes: "None of the notes bear on her relations with Lawson. It does say 'no relative attended to give [her] history'."

While Bertha was in 'Bedlam', the Lawson children were boarded with her friend, Mrs Brandt, in Shepperton, a small town in Surrey in the borough of Spelthorne (more on Shepperton). Henry and Maquarie found a vacant half-house ('Bow Winders'), opposite the manor house (Charlton House) which was on the north side of Charlton Road, about an hour's walk from Shepperton, in the farm labourers' village of Charlton. Here there was the Harrow Inn and a Gypsy camp which had settled on one of farmer Leonard's paddocks about three or four hundred metres from Charlton Road. Here Lawson continued work on the rest of the stories that formed Joe Wilson and His Mates. They were there about three months. The wages for local people were very low, and many of the young women had gone into service, or factories. AG Stephens, with typical tartness, wrote: "... the peasant who had travelled confronted the peasants who had stayed at home. They eyed him; he eyed them; silence, and sensitive prickles. He had travelled too far." Lord Beauchamp came to Henry's aid and paid half of Bertha's hospital fees. (NB: I'm uncertain whether Henry moved to Charlton and had the children boarded at Shepperton after Bertha's suicide attempt and admission to Bethlem or before, while she was in another hospital in London.

"There are two pubs of differing characters in the village: the Bugle Horn and the White Swan ... Just off the main village street are St Luke's Houses ..."   Source

"In 1829 they enclosed the village green which had been in front of the House, and added it to their grounds. This is the reason why the original gateway to the House stands nowadays apparently stranded in the middle of the lawn. The green had been the site of the ancient and notorious Horn Fair, which was transferred to a field nearby until it was suppressed in 1874 on the grounds of the drunken behaviour of the revellers."   Source   More on Charlton   More on the Horn Fair

Charlton Gypsies

"Sometimes, on fine days, when he was in the beerhouse a few doors away, Henry would see the 'Gipsy hags' come in and warm their pints of ale in the funnel-shaped warmer over the coal fire. Whenever they were about he would wander up to the triangular patch of ground, between Charlton and the Four Lanes, known to the locals as the 'Medder', and stare at the painted wagons, and the swarthy wild-eyed men around the camp-fires and think of the tales his mother had told him."  (Prout, 1963)  He wrote about the town in 'Chawlton' and the Harrow Arms pub he called the "Farmer's Arms".

Cross Waterloo Bridge and take train from a big grimy station there on the right-hand side—up the river by train to Shepperton-on-“Tems.” You might stroll round—they are pleasant lanes between deep ditches and blackberry hedges on autumn afternoons. You might stroll round by pleasant brooks, within sound of the river; and by some brickfields, that cannot spoil the scene, and come into the story towards the end, and little unsuspected “hamlets”—that’s the word—lying in wait, half-hidden in side pockets, nooks and corners of the hedges—like shy children who want to give you a pleasant surprise—and you’ll come to either Halliford, Sunbury, Upper Sunbury, or Sunbury-on-Thames. But I want to get you to Charlton, and you’ll be lost in English lanes. But you’ll be directed. You’ll meet a fresh, peachy-bloomed-faced, clear-eyed youth, with the bulk limbs and plod of an English farm labourer, a detached and shelving underlip, which might do if it were trimmed and shored or braced up—were it not for a vague chin, which is hopeless—and a general expression like a blank note of interrogation—if such a thing could be. But he’ll direct you according to the best of his lights.

“Chawlton, sir? Oh, yes, sir! Chawlton. You take that lane wot yer see there, sir, and foller it till yer come to a bridge goin’ across the water, sir. No, sir, that’s not the “Tems,” sir—that’s only a backwater runnin’ inter the Tems, sir. Git through the fence to the right jest before yer come to the bridge, sir; don’t cross the bridge. Don’t cross the bridge, sir. Git through a panel jist at the foot of the bridge where yer see a path worn, sir. (Don’t take no notice of that lane on the other side, sir.) When yer git through yer’ll see medder in front of yer, sir—yer’ll be in the medder, in fact, sir. Go right across the medder till yer comes to a gate with a turnstile and another stile on either side, sir. Yer can take whichever yer like, sir.” (I looked at him for a sign of a bucolic humour, but none was there.) “Go through there an’ yer in Harry Leonard’s farm, sir. Go right through by the house, and it’ll bring yer right inter the road agenst Chawlton, sir. (Mind and don’t take no notice of that there lane I told yer of, sir.)” ...

“Chawlton” is the farm labourers’ village opposite, on the frontage of the farm. Six square, two storied cottages, or rather hutches, of dirty, smoky-looking brown brick, with dirty, smoky-looking tiles, but why I don’t know, for this is far from London’s smoke and grit. Perhaps it was soiled or inferior material from the kilns. Gable roofs all running the same way, and the houses in a straight row and exactly alike. Two or three-foot hawthorn hedge in front, and no division whatever, save an old batten here and there—and the footpaths running up to the back fence—between the vegetable gardens behind. The cottages are double, yet square; four pigeon-hole rooms aside; kitchen-dining-and-general-living-room, with the narrowest and steepest of little stairs running up through it—sort of dirty little ladder with the rungs boxed in. Inevitable dark little parlour in front, with the pitiful little useless toy “suite” on time payment, which is never used. They draw the blind and open the front door sometimes, like the dusty lid of a chest on end, to let some one see the suite, who hasn’t seen it before. Two bedrooms upstairs. I haven’t seen them, so I don’t know what they’re like. There must be a spare room for Granny, or Aunt Emma, when she comes for her annual holiday. Some of the family, if there is one, sleep on made-up beds downstairs on such occasions ...

Along towards Shepperton, some hundred yards or so from the end hutch of the village, was the village beerhouse—“beer-shop” they call it in London (they call things by their names)—with a low door that you stumbled in through, on to sanded floors, and under a low dark old ceiling, with the inevitable great beam, anywhere but in the centre. I stood outside that door late one night, after returning from London, and rapped at family bedroom window above—in the roof—and scared them all, and shook hands with the landlord afterwards—when he put his head out—to soothe him, and said I only wanted to borrow some matches. But that was nothing, for was not I a gent?

I still see the Gypsies dropping in, calling to each other on fine days, and calling for their ale, the hags demanding the funnel-shaped warmer from over the bar, pouring their half-pint into it, and sticking it down amongst the coals. And then hurrying out and on after the caravans.
From 'Chawlton', by Henry Lawson

IF they missed my face in Farmers’ Arms
When the landlord lit the lamp,
They would grin and say in their country way,
‘Oh! he’s down at the Gipsy camp!’
But they’d read of things in the Daily Mail
That the wild Australians do,
And I cared no day what the world might say,
For I came of the Gipsies too. 

‘Oh! the Gipsy crowd are a mongrel lot,
‘And a thieving lot and sly!’
But I’d dined on fowls in the far-off south,
And a mongrel lot was I.
‘Oh! the Gipsy crowd are a roving gang,
‘And a sulky, silent crew!’
But they managed a smile and a word for me,
For I came of the Gipsies too ...

... And the young queen looked in my eyes that night,
In a nook where the hedge grew tall,
And the sky was swept and the stars were bright,
But her eyes had the sheen of all.
The spring was there, and the fields were fair,
And the world to my heart seemed new.
’Twas ‘A Romany lass to a Romany lad!’
But I came of the Gipsies too.
From Lawson's poem 'Gipsy Too' (raises the question of whether Henry had an affair with a Gypsy woman or was just romanticising his life while his wife was in the mental hospital)

"As had been the case in Sydney, Lawson wrote prolifically, rigorously revising and editing his work between drinking bouts. He had no trouble getting his work published, his first books being Children of the Bush and The Country I Come From. These were followed by what many consider to be his finest stories, Joe Wilson and his Mates, sixty-five pages which fudge the boundaries of fiction and autobiography, novel, novella and short story: what today would be seen as discontinuous narrative. The character of Joe, passionate, haunted, someone who uses alcohol as a buffer against the pain of the world, is very much that of his creator; while Mary, who comes from a higher social position than Joe, would seem to have been based on Bertha. The critic, Geoffrey Dutton, writes, 'The triumph of these stories is how much they hold of both autobiography and fiction; Henry and Bertha never led the physical life of Joe and Mary, but it is their mental and spiritual story. It is as a great artist that Lawson finds a symbolic home in the Bush for their loneliness and precarious love, and for his own fragility'."   Source

May 18: As the Royal Yacht sailed into Sydney Harbour, the first radio transmission was made in Australia. Norman Lindsay arrived in Sydney, from Melbourne, on the same day as the Duke (later George V)  and Duchess of York. He took up a cartooning and illustrating position at The Bulletin having been recommended to JF Archibald by Dr Jack Elkington.

June: As arranged by Lawson and his agent Pinker, Blackwood's published Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, which ran through six impressions to 1904. Lawson himself often in severe financial straits, and Blackwood's was generous by sending cheques quickly and on acceptance of work for publication.

July: Henry was severely short of money.

July: "The London United Tramways (LUT) begins operating an electric-powered tram service between Shepherd's Bush, Hammersmith, Acton and Kew."   Source

July 22 or 23: Lawson sent a begging letter to William Blackwood, for money on work he had submitted. He said he expected his wife home in a week or two from Bedlam (she was eventually discharged on August 14) and needed money to set up a comfortable home for the family. Blackwood's reply was sympathetic and reasonable, but he declined to take all the stories before him. He accepted 'Telling Mrs Baker' for £15. He called the other stories "in their own way excellent" but he had published enough Australian stories for a while. This was a severe blow to Lawson, who thought he had a niche in Maga. Blackwood accepted no more of his work. The next letter from Blackwood, in October, began "Dear sir" and was signed "Wm Blackwood and Sons".

July 29: Arthur Maquarie wrote to JF Archibald to deny most strenuously "criminal" rumours from Sydney (conveyed by Louise Mack who had arrived in London) that Lawson had been misbehaving.

August 14: Bertha Lawson was discharged from Bethlem Royal Hospital exactly three months since her admission on May 14 (see above for more details of her time in hospital). They continued to live at 'Bow Winders' in Charlton for a while; Arthur Maquarie moved out as it was only half a house.

August 21: Blackwood's sent final proofs of Joe Wilson and His Mates to Lawson at Charlton, urging him to despatch by return post (he had not been prompt with My Brilliant Career proofs and some others) because of simultaneous publication with Angus & Robertson in Sydney.

Late Summer (English): For unknown reasons Henry and Bertha Lawson, with two infants, moved from a cottage in Charlton to a 5^th-floor flat ninety-odd steps upstairs in Paradise Lane, off James Street (or St James Rd) and Holloway Road, London (34 Princes Mansions, Liverpool Rd, London) (Roderick, 1991; here is a letter from that address which says 34 Princes Mansions, St James' Road; "at the back of a big block of flats called Prince's Mansions, in James Street, Highbury" – Bertha Lawson), though the cold and lack of shops in Charlton might have been a worry to Bertha, and perhaps to remove him from the temptations of visiting the Harrow Inn and the Gypsy camp. The Paradise Lane flat had no bathroom or laundry and "the bug-infested bedroom was about two and a half by three metres. The kitchenette served as a dining room and there was one other tiny room." (Roderick, 1991, p. 238). Lawson was almost destitute. They took the babies in a "perambulator" to Highbury Park. Walking in the Strand, they heard a flower girl crying "Mimosa! Mimosa!" (wattle), and they bought all the flowers she had to decorate their flat, as they were homesick. They used to play imagination games, pretending they were in a Sydney Summer, at places like Manly Beach and by the Harbour. Bertha's hallucinations were again occurring around now.

"One day, without warning Bertha, Henry brought [Edward] Garnett back to their rooms for a meal. Bertha was in a flutter. Although finances had improved, they were still very poor. But she did the best she could. She hashed up a meal of corned beef, fried potatoes, and cabbage, with bread and jam, and tea. Garnett accepted it with good grace. Indeed, it only confirmed his belief in the genuineness of Lawson's democratic outlook and 'the rare, convincing tone of the Australian writer' who was not ashamed of the social class he was born in, and was so unlike 'forty-nine out of fifty Anglo-Saxon writers [who] are insisting on not describing the class they were born in, but straining their necks and their outlooks to describe the life of the class which God has placed beyond them'."   (Prout, 1963) (I do not know which in house this occurred, so now way to date it as yet, and Prout is very lax with his dating in Lawson's biography, which is not anywhere near as good as Roderick's. It might have been much earlier or later, in London, or then Harpenden, or London again. My guess is at this time approximately, in Paradise Lane.)

"Bertha's recollections of her life there were confused, for she was at the time a victim of hallucination. 'We took an attic flat of two small rooms and a kitchenette and bathroom in Paradise Lane, off James Street and Holloway Road,' she wrote. 'Here I had Harry under my eye, instead of losing him for days, when he went to London from Harpenden.' This move actually came a year later. The reason why Lawson had to move from Harpenden to London was to be near the first mental hospital to which Bertha was admitted. He and Bertha did not live in Paradise Row until the late summer of 1901. During the first few weeks of Bertha's detention, Lawson shared a flat at Gray's Inn Road with Maquarie. The children went to a private home at Shepperton, some fifty kilometres up the Thames. The expense of maintaining the home at Harpenden on an uncertain income had been difficult enough. Now Lawson had to find Bertha's hospital fees and those for the children's board as well as his share of bed and board with Maquarie."
Roderick, Colin, Henry Lawson: a life, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1991

September: "... Miles Franklin received her six complimentary copies of My Brilliant Career. She was furious; devastated. To her way of thinking, apart from having her instructions ignored, the removal of the question mark from the title altered the attitude and mood in which her book was meant to be read. She wanted it to be 'a jibing title', indicating its 'sardonically humorous mood'. Instead, the book was taken largely to be autobiographical and still is often read this way. Franklin insisted it was fiction. Read as autobiography, her artifice, her imaginative achievement was at stake.
  "Nor would she have been 'toned down', she believed, if her cover had not been blown. Miles Franklin, male, she knew, would have been allowed to say far more than Miles Franklin, naive bush girl.
  "She felt her raw Australian language had been mutilated, altered, given another kind of voice.
  "The fact that My Brilliant Career went on to receive glowing reviews both in England and Australia did not assuage her anger. Nor the fact that the novel was reprinted six times over the next three years.
  "The bitterness lingered, and was further fuelled, when its sequel, My Career Goes Bung, which she immediately wrote to correct the misreadings of the first novel, was rejected.
  "In 1910, Miles Franklin instructed Blackwood to cease publication of My Brilliant Career. It was never to be reprinted in her lifetime and she left instructions in her will that it was not to be reprinted until 10 years after her death.
  "Today My Brilliant Career is regarded as an Australian classic and 'the first Australian novel'. But what would perhaps please Miles Franklin more than anything is that the title is incorporated into the language as an everyday Australian epithet a sardonic comment on one's life, always spoken with an implied question mark."   Source

Around September: Blackwood's published Joe Wilson and His Mates. Of 'Joe Wilson's Courtship', Garnett wrote, "I have never read anything in modern English that is so absolutely democratic in tone, so much the real thing". Of 'The Drover's Wife' he wrote, "If this artless sketch be taken as a summary of a woman's life, giving its significance in ten short pages, even Tolstoi has never done better". However, he did note Lawson's "crudity and roughness of his literary substance" and his "sentimentality".

September 3: The Australian flag, incorporating the Southern Cross and the Union Jack, was flown for the first time over the Melbourne Exhibition building.

September 5: Miles Franklin sent JF Archibald of The Bulletin a copy of My Brilliant Career for review.

September 13: AG Stephens of The Bulletin asked Miles Franklin for an autobiography and a photograph, and a personal copy of My Brilliant Career.

September 14: With the death of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him as President of the United States.

September 26: Henry's brother Charlie Lawson, half naked and mad, smashing things threw Louisa Lawson out of the house. At Sydney's Central Police Court, Charlie was examined by Dr George H Taylor and Dr Robert T Paton. Louisa Lawson said he often surrounded himself with tomahawks and knives.

September 27: Charlie Lawson was committed to the Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane. There, he said that he was subject to visual and auditory hallucinations (he heard voices), and asked to be given some hard work.

November 26: The Royal Tar, now owned by JJ Craig of Auckland, New Zealand, sank, wrecked off Shearer Rock, Tiritiri Matangi Hauraki Gulf en route from from Auckland to Kaipara, with one mate lost.

November 29: Blackwood paid Lawson off (£100) and expressed doubt to his agent Pinker that sales of Joe Wilson and His Mates would cover the advances made to the author.

December: Tom Mann immigrated to Melbourne where he became active in trade unionism and politics. He became an organizer for the Australian Labor Party, was arrested twice and charged with sedition but on both occasions was acquitted. He returned to England before WWI.

December 12: Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic radio signal in Newfoundland, Canada; it was Morse code for the letter 'S'.

December 31: Callan Park memo said that Charlie Lawson was quarrelsome, bad tempered.

Henry Lawson poems in 1901

Jack Cornstalk [1901]
The Bulletin Hotel
The Things We Dare Not Tell
As Far As Your Rifles Cover
"G.S.," or the Fourth Cook
The Bush Girl
The Never-Never Country
The Shearers
Heed Not
"Unknown"
The Men Who Made Australia

1902

1902 in literature

January 1 - May 19: London
May 21 - mid-June: C/- GMS Gera, to Colombo, Ceylon
June - July 12: C/- GMS Karlsruhe, to Adelaide
August: 'Marlow', Whistler St, Manly, NSW
September: 'Ladywood', Whistler St, Manly, NSW
December: G Ward, Sydney Hospital

Early this year Melba first sang with Caruso, at Monte Carlo.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was published. Also The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle and Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (all three visited Sydney).

Immigration Restriction Act passed.

Third Colonial Conference.

Fort Macquarie was demolished on Bennelong Point, site of today's Sydney Opera House, and replaced by a tram shed.

The Silvercity Writing Tablet: "Launceston stationer J A Birchall in 1902 came up with the bright idea to glue several loose pages of paper together to avoid the writer having to carry loose sheets of paper around the place - and so we had the first Writing Pad."   Source

Active Service Brigade appears to have disbanded by now (Burgmann, 1985, p. 65).

Herbert Hoover (1874 - 1964), with his wife Lou, returned to Australia now a Director of Bewick Moreing, and Manager of their West Australian operations. He became a founder of Zinc Corporation, which became Rio Tint Zinc of Broken Hill.

"Waverley Council wrote to the inspector-general of police to complain that ‘nearly two hundred men’ could be seen bathing at Bondi in the morning, often ‘running along the beach stark naked’. ‘[They] appear to take a great delight in this somewhat disgusting habit’, wrote the council, ‘to the annoyance of those … within view’. In response, the inspector-general assigned Senior Constable McKenzie and Constable Roche to visit Bondi early the next morning.

"The presence of the police prevented the majority of bathers from entering the water. Fifteen defiantly persisted, telling the police that they would take the risk of being summonsed. When the two policemen took down their names they made an interesting discovery. Contrary to all expectations, they found the bathers all to be respectable residents of the district. They even included in their number the local clergyman. They were not ‘larrikins’ at all. Furthermore, the police found their behaviour to be entirely proper. Despite the fact that only two of the men were wearing the neck to knee costume, with the rest wearing only trunks, the police found that they ‘dress and undress under the rocks’. They were not disturbing anyone. They failed to observe anybody ‘running about the beach’ and, anyway, ‘there are only two houses within view of the beach’.

"When McKenzie and Roche passed their report on to Sub-Inspector McDonald, he wrote: 'Bondi Beach has been used as a bathing place by the residents of the Eastern Suburbs during the past twenty years or more … [and] I am unable to see that a practice permitted for so many years should be stopped.'
"The police therefore refused to take any action on the report of ‘nude bathing’."   Source

In this year, although women had the vote in three Australian states, the married women of Cosme had no vote.

Sometime this year: James Edmond ("a little Scotsman" – Vance Palmer) took over from JF Archibald as editor of The Bulletin (Roderick, 1991, p. 275) as Archibald's health had broken down. 'Archy' retained ownership. From Wikipedia: "Unable to rest, he launched a new monthly magazine, The Lone Hand. But soon after he had a complete collapse and spent several years in a mental hospital. Even from there he kept writing, and in 1907 published The Genesis of The Bulletin, an important source for the history of the magazine. Archibald's health never really recovered, and in 1914 he sold his interest in The Bulletin." Sometimes Edmond would give Lawson an advance payment, to get rid of him as Lawson often showed up at The Bulletin (and Angus & Robertson) drunk and disorderly. He would show up at his publishers and abruptly open doors, holding up three fingers, meaning he wanted threepence to buy a beer.

"Edmond could work away quite cheerfully while carrying on one of those meandering conversations that Lawson, in his worst moods, came to impose on his friends. Only once was the little Scotsman's patience exhausted. Lawson had brought in some verses that were still hot in his mind: he insisted on Edmond reading them.
  "'Not now, Henry,' Edmond protested. 'Leave them here for half-an-hour and I'll look them over when I have a minute to spare.'
  Still Lawson insisted, waggling the verses in front of the editorial eye, turning his head aside to gaze vacantly at the door. Finally, Edmond laid down his pen, slowly lit a cigar, and then applied a match to the drooping manuscript in front of him." – Vance Palmer

January: "I myself have seen you drunk in the legislative assembly of New South Wales... I have seen you snoring drunk on several occasions.. you have addressed audiences while under the influence of drink... when in Brisbane about a year ago you got so disgracefully drunk and incapable that medical aid had to be called in so that you could be "toned up" in time to address a big public meeting. On that occasion your condition and demeanour, the result of your drinking, so shocked some of the audience nearest the platform that they left in shame and disgust... I charge you with being very frequently under the influence of drink ever since the meeting of the federal parliament... and when you were supposed to be discharging the duties of your high constitutional office of Prime Minister.. Quite recently you came into chamber so drunk you were scarcely able to stand... on another occasion, seeing your drunken, helpless state, the Speaker generously put an end to the painful scene [when] he saw you were incapable of properly doing [so]... "
John Norton; in his 4,000-word 'Open Letter to Edmund Barton, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth, Concerning His Disgusting Drinking Habits', Sydney Truth. 

A few months later, Norton was at his favourite detox  and rehab, Dr O'Hara's in Collins Street, Melbourne.

About February 10: Henry sent to his agent Pinker the MS for a new book, The Heart of Australia. Earl Beauchamp offered to write a preface for the book.

February 11: Henry wrote to David Scott Mitchell that he wasn't satisfied with Joe Wilson and His Mates as he "was ill and nearly mad with worry". He wrote that he expected to bring the family home before next Winter – presumably British Winter – but "of course I'll return to London". He said that Blackwood's had paid him £00 "for a book they hadn't seen", when in fact he had begged that amount from them and they were no longer really dealing with him. Although he had just told Edward Garnett that Bertha was still laid up, he told Mitchell "Mrs Lawson and the children" were "blooming".

February 12: Louisa Lawson's mailbag fastener case: Suit in Equity re mailbag fasteners held and Louisa was granted a permanent injunction. Murray's pirated fastener was restrained, an enquiry held. The enquiry found in her favour, but she was only awarded £300, which was reduced on appeal to just £60.

February 18: Lawson wrote to Garnett a list of titles of sketches (largely literary criticism, much of it bitter about 'the Australian literary humbug' such as AG Stephens, which he said he could write (30,000 to 40,000 words) in a week.

February 27: Lawson, revealing his limitations in literary and intellectual matters ("old copy put aside which I think nothing of but which might strike you"; "If you know Bourke you know Australia") wrote again to Garnett with ideas for his new book. Garnett, unsurprisingly,  was unimpressed. Still, Garnett's glowing 'Appreciation' of Lawson appeared soon after this.

February 27: Breaker Morant was executed in South Africa.

March 7: Boer War: South African Boers won their last battle over British forces, with the capture of a British general and 200 of his men.

March 8: The PMG settled out of court with Murray, 250 pounds damages. At damages enquiry, Louisa Lawson got 300 pounds. reduced to 60 pounds on appeal. Davies and Unwin, in the PMG, suspected organised crime and sabotaging of Louisa Lawson's fasteners. Louisa had vocal support from Dawn readers, plus The Women's Social and Political League, The Women's Progressive Association, The Women's Liberal League who all portrayed it as sexism.

March 11: Charlie Lawson allowed day leave from Callan Park and returned home briefly.

Pictured at right: Louisa Lawson

March 22: JC Williamson's Ben Hur commenced at the Theatre Royal, complete with horses racing on a treadmill arrangement with a moving diorama behind. After several weeks the theatre was closed because of an outbreak of bubonic plague, and not long after that, the theatre and its production burnt down.

March 25: Miles Franklin "[m]eets A. B. Paterson to ask his professional advice about her publishing Agreement; a friendship develops, with literary collaboration proposed and Paterson sending her money until her 'ship comes home'" Source

About April 1: William and Mary Gilmore and son William arrived at Liverpool, UK. After leaving Cosme, the Gilmores had first gone to Buenos Aries, then Mary had worked as an English teacher privately to Spanish families in Puerto Gallegos, Patagonia. Her son and husband had been sick on the ship and were still ill (bronchitis and whooping cough), and she had been in hospital in Buenos Aires with flu. In this month, Mary wrote to Henry Lawson, who was residing with his family at 34 Princes Mansions, Liverpool Rd, London (Roderick, 1991; here is a letter from that address which says 34 Princes Mansions, St James' Road), which address she got from the Agent-General (she also tried unsuccessfully to locate her brother John Cameron, who was out of work, formerly a Reuters rep in the Boer War). She said she was hard up and Billy was too ill to travel, so asked the Lawsons to come to Liverpool to see them. Lawsons replied by reply-paid telegram on April 4.

April 4: Henry Lawson or Bertha ( Roderick says Bertha) replied to Mary Gilmore by reply-paid telegram: "Am writing. Can you come to us. Will see you through. Will meet you in London. Wire reply paid." After some exchanges the Gilmores arrived. They had stayed at the Temperance Hotel in Liverpool and Salvation Army room at 39 Union St, Liverpool. The Gilmores were going to Sydney and Henry Lawson asked them to accompany Bertha and the children. Mary and William took an instant dislike to Bertha, who immediately complained about Henry, and said he had cut her on the wrist, but Mary saw no mark and Bertha would not let her look closely.

Late April: Mary Gilmore and family arrived at Lawsons'. Mary's diary shows she appeared to take an almost instant dislike to Henry’s wife Bertha (she had already met her before Paraguay; see November 15, 1895) and she did not like her physiognomy (these were the days of popular phrenology):

Gilmore: "Within half an hour she was telling me how unhappy she was and how badly he was treating her … nothing on earth would make her live with him again once she got away.
  "That night Will [Mary's husband] said to me – ‘If that woman were my wife I would wring her neck! She isn’t fit to be any man’s wife.’ Mrs Lawson had given me to understand that Henry was guilty of unnameable brutality."

Yet Mary Gilmore found Henry "clean, bright and affectionate in his manner to his wife and children". Lawson arranged for the Gilmores to accompany his wife and children back to Australia, which was why he was so anxious for them to come to their flat. Bertha accused Henry to Mary as having committed "unnameable immorality" and that he was a terrible wife beater, and had threatened her with a knife. The Gilmores did not believe her, especially as she said she could always make Henry do what she wanted, and she could always "threaten to throw the children out of the window". Mary had Lawson take Bertha back to the doctor at Bethlem Hospital, who (according to Mary Gilmore) said that if Bertha didn't get home to Sydney, she would drive Henry as mad as her. The Gilmores sought the opinion of Nelson Illingworth's parents: Illingworth said that Henry was living in hell because of Bertha. Edward Garnett similarly told Mary that it would be a good thing if Bertha could be removed from Henry. He thought that but for Bertha, Lawson could "do what he liked with the British public".

Late April?: Henry Lawson wrote to the 'Red Page' that he was sending Mrs Lawson back to Sydney (due on about June 23) and would follow as soon as he'd proofread a new book (Methuen). "Have been wonderfully successful from a literary point of view ... [Blackwell's, Cassell's, Chambers's] but my health has completely broken down ... I know London as well as the bush ..." He brought the proofs of Children of the Bush with him and sent them back from Port Said (published later that year). Possibly his haste was because Hannah Thornburn was pregnant.

April 30: The SS Karlsruhe (3189 tons; Master A Koenemann) set sail from Bremerhaven, a city in the federal state of Bremen, Germany. Bertha and the two children (Bertha now aged 2 years and 2 months; Jim was four years, two months), travelled on it to Australia with the Gilmores, via Geno and Naples. Henry, who Mary Gilmore says was "anxious beyond belief for the children" and "afraid of [Bertha's] insanity", followed on the Gera on May 21.

May 2: After a few days' sightseeing in London, Bertha, the children, and the Gilmores, set sail from Southampton and on to Antwerp where they set sail for Sydney on this day, on the SS Karlsruhe, by steerage. The journey was bad for all concerned, with fighting and Mary later writing that Bertha was irrational.

May 6: Death of Bret Harte, American writer (b. 1836), one of Lawson's favourites.

May 20: SS Karlsruhe passed through the Suez Canal. After crossing the Red Sea, things got worse. Mary critical of Bertha sleeping on deck on hot nights, kids below decks. Bertha neglected the children. Propeller broke. Patched at Aden but broke in Indian Ocean after leaving Colombo, then limped back to Colombo for repairs, but couldn't be done there, so repaired in Bombay, left Bombay when it ran into the edge of a cyclone and some of the cargo of marble shifted. Back to Bombay (took six days at sea) where it was dry-docked and repaired. Meanwhile, Henry Lawson on SS Gera (sister ship of the Karlsruhe), which had left Antwerp on May 21, arrived at Colombo. When the Karslruhe arrived at Colombo for the third time, Henry Lawson transferred to it, much to the relief of the Gilmores.   How far is it? (Calculate distances between cities)

May 21: Despite Pinker's and Earl Beauchamp's pleas for him to stay in London (he still hadn't read the proofs of Methuen's publication of Children of the Bush), Henry boarded the SS Gera (3165 tons; Master Carl von Bardelben, bound for Australia via Genoa and Naples), a ship of the same line as the Karlsruhe. Lawson partied and drank ferociously on the ship. Went ashore at Antwerp with mates; he wrote to JF Archibald, "In Antwerp we collared a hurdy-gurdy on the wharf and I turned while my shipmates took up a collection for the woman who owned the dreadful machine. She was just like a tub upside down with a pumpkin in the middle of it." With several books now in print, he had fame and just a little money. Prout (1963) writes: "But there may have been another reason for his excitement. In the poem, 'Hannah Thomburn' [note, Hannah's surname was Thornburn but the poem was spelt with the misprint 'Thomburn' – PW], he says:

'Hannah Thomburn' (sic; 1905)

By Henry Lawson

She was mine on return from succeeding
In a struggle that no one shall know;
She only knew my heart was bleeding,
She only knew what dealt the blow.
I had fought back the friends that were clutching,
I had forced back the heart-scalding tears,
Just to lay my hot head to her touching
And to weep for Two Terrible Years.

"The meaning of the first two lines is not clear, but apparently Lawson means to imply that Hannah had agreed 'to be his' on his return from England, a suggestion which is supported by the lines in the next verse:

"Till, no longer world shackled or frightened,
The voice of the past would be stilled,
Hearts quickened, cheeks flushed and eyes brightened,
And the love of our lives be fulfilled.

"If the opening lines of the poem mean what they appear to – coming back to Australia to start a new life with Hannah – it becomes easy to understand why Henry and Bertha travelled home in different ships. It also makes it seem probable that, with a possible marital split-up in the offing, life in the little attic flat in Paradise Lane during the last few months of their London stay must have been anything but paradisial [sic]. There is, however, no proof that Bertha knew of the arrangement between Hannah and her husband – if, indeed, there was such an arrangement. There are only Henry's statements, and though the poem in which he makes them is no doubt a sincere one, it is a rather maudlin affair, written at a later date." 
(Prout, Denton, Henry Lawson: The grey dreamer, Rigby Ltd, Adelaide, 1963; pp 197 f)

The poem continues: 

It was Antwerp, and Plymouth,—th' Atlantic, 
And so well had Love's network been laid, 
That I heard of her illness grown frantic, 
At Genoa, Naples—Port Said. 
I was mad just to reach her and "tell her," 
But a sandbank at Suez tripped me, 
And we limped with a broken propeller, 
Through all Hades a-down the Red Sea.
Through the monsoon we rolled like a Jumbo,
With a second blade shaken away,
There was never a dock in Colombo
So the captain drank hard to Bombay.
Then a "point" in the south like an anthill
Or seawastes—then hove into sight—
I called for no news at Fremantle
For I wanted to hope through the Bight.

"The facts do not confirm Lawson's statements. The Gera reached Colombo on 20 June, after a normal uninterrupted voyage. It was the Karlsruhe, the ship carrying Bertha and the children, that suffered the mishaps: snapped propeller; a collision with some wreckage with loss of another blade soon after leaving Suez for Aden; the loss of still another propeller blade between Colombo and Fremantle, forcing the ship to return to Colombo; a "bout" with a cyclone after leaving Colombo; and another return to Colombo, followed by a spell in dock at Bombay.

"Henry, who had arrived in Colombo on June 20, heard of the misadventures of the Karlsruhe and, according to Bertha, 'cabled me that he would wait there and continue the voyage with us in the Karlsruhe, which he did, our ship calling there after being docked.'

"When her ship anchored at Colombo, Bertha was amazed to see Henry dressed in white from head to foot, sailing out to meet her in a hired catamaran piled high with various tropical fruits he had bought as welcoming gifts. Henry had been 'celebrating,' and enjoyed the sensation he caused.

"Relations were strained between the Lawsons for the rest of the voyage. Whether Henry's drinking was the only reason for Bertha's refusal to forgive him is impossible to say.

"The Adelaide Advertiser of Monday, 14 July 1902, recorded the arrival of their steamer:

"'The German mail steamer, Karlsruhe, a bit belated, reached the roadstead on Saturday, 12 July, 1902, and dropped anchor a long way out in a dismal drizzle of rain. Some of the passengers, who did not wish to wait till morning, got ashore in time for the last train to town.'

"Among the impatient passengers, apparently, was Lawson. Here is his account:

"There's a gentleman, reading, shall know it,
There's an earl who will now understand,
Why I "slighted" the son of their poet
(And a vice-regal lord of the land)
—Semaphore—and a burst through the wicket 
On platform left guards in distress— 
A run without luggage or ticket, 
A cab, and the Melbourne Express.
Twas a brother-in-grief of mine told me
With harsh eyes unwontedly dim,
With a hand on my shoulder to hold me
And a grip on my own—to hold him.
A dry choke, and words cracked and hurried,
A stare, as of something afraid,
And he told me that Hannah was buried,
On the day I reached Port Adelaide.

(The 'son of their poet' was Lord Tennyson, Governor of South Australia.)"

(Prout, 1963)

May 29: Melbourne: Hannah Thornburn was admitted to hospital. She gave her occupation as 'domestic' and her address as Balaclava.

May 31: Treaty of Vereeniging ended the Second Boer War.   Boer War chronology

June: Cosme celebrated the coronation of Edward VII by hoisting flags and they had an evening social.

June 1: Hannah Thornburn, 25, died, possibly from a botched abortion as she was four months pregnant and had been ill for two weeks. Lawson says in his poem 'Lily of St Leonards' that his love died three days before he got back to Australia:

From 'Lily of St Leonards' (1907)

By Henry Lawson

'Tis sunrise over Watson's,
Where I sailed out to sea,
On that wild run to London
That wrecked and ruined me.

The beauty of the morning
On point and bluff and bay,
But the Lily of St Leonards
Was fairer than the day.

Oh! Lily of St Leonards!
But I was mad to roam—
She died with loving words for me,
Three days ere I came home.

However, this was poet's licence, as it was about six weeks: after disembarking the Karlsruhe at Adelaide on July 12 he arrived in Melbourne the next day to hear that she was dead. It was possibly Nelson Illingworth who broke the news, as the Sydney-based sculptor for whom Hannah had modelled was in Melbourne examining photos of the Governor-General who he had been commissioned to carve. (Prout, 1963)   See also 'To Hannah'; 'Do They Think That I Do Not Know?':

'Do They Think That I Do Not Know?'

THEY SAY that I never have written of love,
As a writer of songs should do;
They say that I never could touch the strings
With a touch that is firm and true;
They say I know nothing of women and men
In the fields where Love’s roses grow,
And they say I must write with a halting pen—
Do you think that I do not know? 

When the love-burst came, like an English Spring,
In the days when our hair was brown,
And the hem of her skirt was a sacred thing
And her hair was an angel’s crown.
The shock when another man touched her arm,
Where the dancers sat round in a row;
The hope and despair, and the false alarm—
Do you think that I do not know? 

By the arbour lights on the western farms,
You remember the question put,
While you held her warm in your quivering arms
And you trembled from head to foot.
The electric shock from her finger tips,
And the murmuring answer low,
The soft, shy yielding of warm red lips—
Do you think that I do not know? 

She was buried at Brighton*, where Gordon** sleeps,
When I was a world away;
And the sad old garden it’s secret keeps,
For nobody knows to-day.
She left a message for me to read,
Where the wild wide oceans flow;
Do you know how the heart of a man can bleed—
Do you think that I do not know? 

I stood by the grave where the dead girl lies,
When the sunlit scenes were fair,
And the white clouds high in the autumn skies,
And I answered the message there.
But the haunting words of the dead to me
Shall go wherever I go.
She lives in the Marriage that Might Have Been—
Do you think that I do not know? ... (more)

* Brighton cemetery, Victoria. ** Adam Lindsay Gordon

 

Uncertain of date, year (1908?), or even title of Henry Lawson's poem:

When his heart is growing bitter and his hair is growing grey,
And he hears the debt-collector knocking several times a day,
And the shrill voice of the Missus, blame, reiterate, accuse—
Then the poet who was famous feels inclined to damn the muse— .....

When he hears a sudden rapping—rapping at his chamber door,
Then he knows it's no good trying to write poems any more,
Then he bursts from out his chamber and he grabs his battered hat,
And he cadges Two Bob somewhere and gets beered up on his pat.

Note the reference to Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Raven', which is about a lost love who died.

June 3: Hannah Thornburn was buried at the Boroondara General Cemetery, commonly known as the Kew Cemetery, Kew, Melbourne, Victoria, her grave and other funeral expenses paid for by the YWCA. Only gravediggers and a clergyman attended the funeral. (Prout, 1963)

For more about Hannah and Henry, see 1906 (notes at the beginning of year) in this chronology.

June 4: Henry on board the SS Gera at Naples. He had not yet sent the promised 224 pages of proofreading of Children of the Bush, but her read them here rather than carouse in Naples, and he wrote to Edward Garnett that he had been sober since Genoa and was going to remain abstinent. At Genoa (where he had had a good time) he had received a letter from Bertha that she and the children, on board the SS Karlsruhe, were well, which was a relief to him. Maybe he had an affair:

... And she was fair in Genoa,
    And she was very kind,
Those pale blind-seeming eyes that seem
    Most beautifully blind.
Oh they are sad in Genoa,
    Those poor soiled singing birds.
I had but three Italian words
    And she three English words.

But love is cheap in Genoa,
    Aye, love and wine are cheap,
And neither leaves an aching head,
    Nor cuts the heart too deep;
Save when the knife goes straight, and then
    There’s little time to grieve—
The only city in the world
    That I was loath to leave.

I’ve said farewell to tinted days
    And glorious starry nights,
I’ve said farewell to Naples with
    Her long straight lines of lights;
But it is not for Naples but
    For Genoa that I grieve,
The only city in the world
    That I was loath to leave.
From 'Genoa', 1904

Like Joe Wilson and His Mates for Blackwood's, Children of the Bush sold poorly for Methuen which had not recouped its £200 advance even by 1905.

June 6: Charlie Lawson discharged from Callan Park after more than eight months a committed patient.

June 12: Australia's Commonwealth Franchise Act came into force, second in the world after New Zealand (more), giving all women the right to vote in federal elections but excluding ‘aboriginal natives of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand’ unless they already had the vote at State level (as stipulated in S 41 of the Constitution). The women's vote was gained in Australia by the untiring efforts of some men and many women, including Maybanke Anderson, Rose Scott, Emma Miller, Vida Goldstein and Louisa Lawson (called by Rose Scott 'the Mother of Women's Suffrage').

A world chronology of women's electoral rights    The Dawn Club/Womanhood Suffrage League

June 16: Uniform Franchise Act (with the glaring exception of Asians, Aborigines and Africans and anyone "attainted of treason, or who has been convicted and is under sentence or subject to be sentenced for any offence punishable ... by imprisonment for one year or longer"). (Ollif says the Bill was presented by Sir John Slee on July 17.)

June 18: Death of Samuel Butler (b. 1835), British writer best known for his satire Erewhon.

June 28: AG Stephens published Henry Lawson's letter of c. May 21 in 'Red Page', with the acerbic comment: "'I know London' – a bit of a delusion, that!"

July 12: Henry Lawson left the Karlsruhe at Adelaide, took the overnight train to Melbourne, leaving Bertha and the children to fend for themselves. In Melbourne he found that Hannah had been dead for six weeks (June 1). He rejoined the ship in Melbourne after a reconciliation with Bertha at her brother's place in Williamstown (the circumstances of this are hazy because Bertha Lawson, writing about it, got her dates wrong, according to Henry's biographer Prout, 1963). Monte Grover of the Argus interviewed Mary and Henry together, noting that Mary's dream of New Australia had failed, and Henry added that Bill Gilmore was "fed up" with six years of the "brotherhood of man". Lawson was fed up with the ship and took the train back to Sydney.

Sometime this year, Henry walked into the office of the Worker in Kent Street, Sydney and there met Tom Mutch, who was working there. Mutch wrote: "One day, in nineteen hundred and two, a tall, lean, dark man came to the counter, stood, smiled and saluted (recognizing now an employee), and then impulsively came round the counter, placed his hands on my shoulders, looked long with the deepest eyes I have ever seen in a man, and said, 'You'll do'."

July 21: A cable appeared in the Sydney papers: 'The Earl of Meath has suggested that an Empire Day holiday should be observed'. This idea was championed by the British Empire League of Australia and its president, Canon Francis Bertie Boyce. (Source) It was a response to republicanism.

July 24: John Farrell & family and Camerons (presumably Mary Gilmore's family) & others met the Karlsruhe in Sydney. Bertha was on board with the children, Henry dallied in Melbourne then came to Sydney by train, arriving around the same  time. He discovered that AG Stephens had written in The Bulletin's 'Red Page' that did not think much of his stories (basically, Joe Wilson and His Mates) that had been accepted by Blackwood's Maga ("Some of his recent work at Blackwood would hardly pass muster here").

July 1902 - June 1903: Henry Lawson and Bertha reconciliation; failed; Bertha was pregnant. Henry's address for the first five of these months were 'Marlow', 3 Beauchamp Terrace, Whistler St, Manly (Henry moved in on August 6, after Bertha, who found the home); then the Lawsons moved to a cheaper accommodation at 'Ladywood', Whistler St, Manly. Henry drinking a lot. According to Bertram Stevens, "rows broke out frequently." Methuen published Henry Lawson's book Children of the Bush around now; these and other stories of this time tend to be more maudlin, sometimes about down-and-outers, boozers, turning over a new leaf and other alcoholic themes. He wrote the story 'A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father' around now, reverting to his childhood for a theme.

August 6: Henry moved into 'Ladywood', Whistler St, Manly, and soon had an anxious letter from Miles Franklin, who was now living as a companion in Rose Scott's house ('Lynton', Jersey Road?). Franklin, who had just finished The Outside Track, was concerned about poor sales of My Brilliant Career and wanted to switch from Blackwood's to Angus & Robertson, but Lawson advised against this.

August 9: Edward VII was crowned King of the United Kingdom.

About now: Bertha Lawson, as Henry was not providing, took a job selling for a firm of Sydney booksellers.

August: 19: Sydney businessman and philanthropist Quong Tart was bashed and all Sydney was shocked. The once-poor immigrant who was said to be “as well known as the Governor himself” died at his home in Ashfield (photo) on July 26, 1903.

September 29: Death of Emile Zola, (b. 1840) French author.

October 11: Melba's Sydney concerts began (her first Aust. tour). By October 7, 4,568 pounds had been taken at box office. She sang five encores and won Sydney. Her second concert on Tuesday October 14 was equally successful. On October 16 the Sydney Morning Herald published a letter from the prima donna. Dated from ‘The Australia’ on October 15, Melba postponed her concerts. "I have for the last two days been suffering from a slightly relaxed throat."   More

October 19: Electric tram services to Bondi Beach began.   Source

October 30 (approx): John Norton was arrested for drunkenness on the steps of Parliament House, Melbourne and spent the night in the Little Bourke Street lock-up.

November 14: Louisa Lawson's last-ditch effort to get compensation from the PM-G was failing. She asked the new Commonwealth PM-G to take her mail-bag fasteners at cost. Her solicitor AB Davies probably advised that now Australia was a Commonwealth she could do no more with the dispute which started with the Colony of NSW.

November 20: Lord Tennyson, grandson of the English poet, was appointed Governor-General of Australia.

November 20: At the growing pressure from Indians in South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), Indian leader and proponent of civil disobedience, returned to South Africa to champion the Indian cause against anti-Asiatic legislation in Transvaal.

Around now: Bertha became ill and was treated in a private hospital in Manly for weeks. Young Joseph ('Jim') Lawson, aged 4, was prone to convulsions, and baby Bertha to sobbing. She was discharged before November, but came home to a broke household. The furniture was distrained. Bertha took the children to her mother's in Castlereagh St (Henry protested to Bland Holt that his mother-in-law was "also insane"). Henry around now saw the Bredt's family doctor Dr Frank Bennett in College St to get Bertha into an asylum again.

Around now: Henry had a note about Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career published in The Bulletin. He tells how he "barracked" for it with Blackwood's, even for passages that he "blushed at", revealing aspects of the puritanical attitudes he learned as a child. His friendships were falling off (Henry and Mary Cameron blamed Bertha), and it seems he had no more correspondence with Miles Franklin. The thought of death haunted him. Rose Scott asked George Robertson to give financial assistance to Bertha, which he did. Henry was waiting for £50 from Methuen, and was conscious of an old debt of £5 to Walter Woods, aka Walter Head (Roderick, 1991).

December 2: The assailant of Quong Tart, Frederick Duggan, was sentenced to twelve years. "The police were for some time baffled in their attempts to secure the arrest of the assailant, but after several weeks the extreme cleverness of Sub-Inspector Roche and Senior-Sergeant M‘Lean, assisted by Senior-Constable Macintosh and Constables Clarke and Coombes, was fully rewarded, for they succeeded in proving their captured man guilty, he receiving a sentence of twelve years’ penal servitude on the 2nd of December, 1902."   Source

The Life of Quong Tart, or, How a Foreigner Succeeded in a British Community, by Mrs Quong Tart

December 4: Bertha Lawson swore that she had to leave Henry for fear of assault.

December 6: Saturday, before 10 a.m.: Henry Lawson was found by a fisherman. In a failed suicide attempt, Henry had jumped off a cliff (possibly 80 or 90 feet, according to Sydney Morning Herald next day) while intoxicated, at Fairy Bower, a small beach at Manly, New South Wales. The fisherman called Dr GRP Hall, who had attended to Bertha earlier in the year. Broken ankle, lacerations over right eye; he went to Sydney Hospital. AG Stephens made light of it in The Bulletin of February 28, 1903. Bertha agreed to postpone the hearing of a summons for maintenance and pawned some things for £10  to pay overdue debts; she tried for jobs, and to get boarders. She visited Henry and brought delicacies. Then Henry Lawson went to Marrickville, to a rehab (probably early 1903). (A source had December 6 as the date of Henry's fall; however, The Taranaki Herald (New Zealand) reported the fall on December 6, so I am uncertain of the actual date.)

Late in year: Bertha was trying unsuccessfully to make Henry Lawson pay maintenance. Henry in Sydney Hospital recovering from his fall at Fairy Bower, Manly; he had been found by a fisherman. It was reported in the London Daily Chronicle of January 13, 1903, and this report found its way into The Bulletin (Sydney) of February 28, 1903. Henry wrote 'G Ward', a sketch, and another called 'The Hospital', about his stay in hospital, which are not maudlin and he seems to be more concerned about the misfortunes of others than himself; he seems to have done well from the stay in hospital.

1877 sketch of Fairy Bower    Pictures of Fairy Bower

December 13: Henry's story 'A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father' was published in The Bulletin. (?) (Prout, 1963)

December 20: Henry's poem 'Ruth' was published in The Bulletin. Bert Stevens visited Henry in Sydney Hospital.

   More

Henry Lawson poems in 1902

The Drums of Battersea
Gipsy Too
Bourke
Say Good-bye When Your Chum is Married
The Separation
When Bertha Comes to Tea
Barta (Prout, 1963, says this was written in 1903)
Ruth
The Wander-Light (Prout, 1963, says this was written in 1903)
Will Yer Write It Down for Me?
Shearer's Dream

 

1903

1903 in literature

April: Prince Alfred Hospital
July-December: C/- Mrs Isabel Byers, North Sydney Coffee Palace, 145 Miller St, North Sydney
(October: C/- AB Davies, Solicitor, Rofe Chambers, 60 Castlereagh St, Sydney)

c. 1903: Gertrude married John Lloyd, a New Zealander, at Narrobin.

Vida Goldstein became the first woman in the British Empire to stand for national election (Australian Commonwealth Parliament) but did not win a seat.

Will Rogers toured Australia doing rope tricks in Wirth Brothers' Circus.

The Bolshevik Group came into existence at a meeting of exiled radicals in London.

Self-styled Russian aristocrat-turned-nihilist Ernest De Guinney spent just three months at Cosme and wrote bitterly about his experience. He said it was run by a selfish clique and was full of sexual immorality.

Victoria: Feminist and founder of the Women's Federal Political Association, Vida Goldstein unsuccessfully sought election to the Senate.

JA Andrews died.

Henry Lawson's brother Peter married Elizabeth Roberts, eventually having nine children.

"The Women's Social and Political Union was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst with support from her daughters Christabel and Sylvia."   Source

January 9: Hallam Tennyson, 2^nd Baron Tennyson, son of English Poet Laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, became the second Governor-General of Australia. " He had been acting since 17 July 1902 when Lord Hopetoun left Australia. Lord Tennyson remained in office until 21 January 1904."   Source

January 27: Henry wrote an IOU for £5 to Angus & Robertson.

February: Henry won Bertha around with verse and probably pleas. By April she was again pregnant.

March 31: Richard Pearse (1877 - 1953) was reputed to have flown a heavier than air machine (before the Wright Brothers) in powered flight near Pleasant Point, South Canterbury, New Zealand; some claim 1902.

April approx: Henry was admitted by Dr Hall to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Camperdown, Sydney (under care of Dr Charles Bickerton Blackburn) for alcoholism treatment. While he was in hospital, Bertha wrote to Henry: "Of course, when you are drunk, you are not responsible for what you say. But your cursed relatives go and verify your drunken statements. If you wish us to come together again, it is on the understanding not a relative of yours darkens our door. I will never speak to Peter or your Mother so long as I live. She can go where people can see her and shed crocodile tears and make a blessed fuss, but she would not put her hand in her pocket and give your children a sixpence. I hate her." Of course, Louisa Lawson had not had much opportunity even to see Bertha and Henry's children as they had been away so much. Plus, she had been bedridden much of the time. Bertha was again pregnant due to the February 1903 reconciliation, but miscarried around now. Then their furniture was distrained because of unpaid rent. Bertha had a miscarriage. Bertha and Henry took a furnished house, 'Ivy Cottage', near the home of Victor Daley.

Bertha and Henry asked Bertram Stevens (who had once worked for a solicitor) to draw up a document of legal separation., and he agreed Henry later came to Stevens and asked him to bluff Bertha, preventing her from completing the separation. "I advised Mrs Lawson to go to a solicitor and apply for a judicial separation which she did. It was clear to me at the time that Lawson was very fond of his wife, and loth to lose her, yet it was impossible for them to be happy together ... From that time, Lawson went down hill steadily."   (Prout, 1963)

In a Darlinghurst boarding house owned by a Mrs Colman, Henry met Mrs Isabel Byers.

April 6: Bertha Lawson filed for judicial separation. Solicitors Beeby and Henderson on advice of Bertram Stevens. Soon she wrote to Henry asking for reconciliation. She pawned her wedding ring, reluctantly. She boarded the children with strangers while she tried to earn money, and pleaded with Henry for money so she wouldn't be forced to place the children in the Benevolent Asylum. She apparently took the children back and did door-to-door selling with the children locked in the flat all day.

April 9: Peter Lawson was admitted to Callan Park Mental Hospital. Religious mania and delusions that God was speaking to him and through him. He insisted he saw blood on the doctor's hands, and had to fight lions and eagles all day.

April 28: At the request of Lawson, who was hard up for lawyers' fees, Angus & Robertson paid him £10, a price he nominated, for his right, title and interest in the poems in Children of the Bush. (He sold the stories to A&R on August 11, 1905, for £25.) Around now Bertha had to go to hospital for an operation to fix a jaw fracture caused in a clumsy tooth extraction.

June 4: Bertha, who had moved to 387½ Dowling St, received a judicial separation (announced in a Sydney Morning Herald notice on June 5), citing cruelty and habitual drunkenness. It was granted, and Henry (who was represented by James Elphinstone) agreed to pay maintenance of 30 shillings a week, with access one afternoon a week. "Within a month, as Lawson was ‘drying out’ in a convalescent hospital [Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital (now known as Rivendell) on the Parramatta River, Concord where he apparently took a liking to a Nurse Alma Clarke – PW], his wife’s solicitors were arranging with Angus & Robertson to pay a portion of Lawson’s earnings direct to her."   Source

"On the southern bank of the Parramatta River travelling west towards the Olympic Games site at Homebush Bay is an imposing red brick building nestling behind the mangroves and spacious lawns. This is Rivendell Adolescent Unit (originally the Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital). Visit the following pages to learn a little of its history and come on a tour of the buildings and grounds of this part of Sydney that is from a bygone era .."   Source

Henry Lawson wrote 'The Unknown Patient' about Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital:

The moonlight breathes on Walker House and softens scrub and hill;
The native trees are strangely stirred, the pines are very still;
The nurse's lantern flits and flits, and pain and sorrow cease,
For all the patients are asleep, and all is Rest and Peace ...

July 26: Quong Tart died, aged 53, and the attendees at his funeral were a 'who's who' of Sydney. He was buried in Rookwood cemetery with a Christian service read in Cantonese. His six children at this time included, Vine (16), Henrietta (13), Arthur (11),  Maggie (6), Florence Gertrude (about 2). Margaret Tart was pregnant in February; exactly when the baby George Henry Bruce Tart was born I do not know.

• Tart, Ann Alice Vine (1887 - 1946)
• Tart, Arthur Malcolm (1892 - 1926)
• Tart, Florence (1898 - )
• Tart, George Henry Bruce (1903 - 1946)
• Tart, Gertrude
• Tart, Henrietta ('Ettie') (1890 - 1942)
• Tart, Maggie (1897 - 1917)

 

Sometime around now: Lawson stayed at his mother-in-law's dosshouse for five shillings a week. Sometimes slept at Louisa Lawson's home.

Around now: Jack Brereton was appalled by Lawson's poem 'The Alleys' and wrote a poem in The Bulletin criticising Lawson for what he had become. George Robertson arranged with Lawson for him to write his autobiography of not less than 35,000 words by April 7, 1904, probably to help him. Twenty pounds down and £4 a week, £100 in all. In other words, Lawson allowed himself 20 weeks to write fewer than 2,000 words a week. But he never finished it, as by April, 1906 he had 30,000 words and wrote no more.

August: Rose Scott organised a petition to Parliament to have the age of consent raised to 17.

August 5: Death of Phil May.

September: Louisa Lawson had to sell some of the furniture at the Dawn office at 138 Phillip Street, Sydney, to pay for the now useless mail-bag fasteners. She was now becoming mentally unbalanced. Various women's leagues gave support to Louisa Lawson for her court case. Mentions were made in The Dawn of a 'syndicate of politicians' who were to blame, and they were 'too strong for her to overcome'.

September 15: George Robertson wrote to Louisa Lawson that if she had enough poems as good as 'To a Libertine' to make a book, he would be delighted to publish it.

September 24: Edmund Barton stepped down as Prime Minister of Australia and was succeeded by Alfred Deakin.

October: Bertha Lawson's baby was stillborn.

October 6: The High Court of Australia sat for the first time.

Towards the end of 1903: Henry, residing with Mrs Isabel Byers, North Sydney Coffee Palace, 145 Miller St, North Sydney, became a regular drinker at a pub in the Blues Point area of North Sydney.

He was reading Jack London and Rudyard Kipling, among others. He drank, by his own account, in "a small hotel on the top of a cliff with a view across a small bay" with a coterie of "waterside characters" and ne'er-do-wells. Named after local mariner, black Caribbean-born eccentric Billy Blue who ran the ferry there in the early 1800s, Blues Point is at the very southern tip of the McMahons Point peninsular and has spectacular views of Sydney Harbour. Round about now Henry wrote 'The Alleys', a maudlin  poem that in effect farewelled his friends as he would henceforth be found among the down and outs:

And if you should some day miss me, and should care to wonder why,
Ask for me amongst the alleys by the name they knew me by ...

Jack Brereton castigated him for his "whine" and defeatism, in 'Memoranda to Joe Swallow' (Joe Swallow was one of Lawson's nom de plumes, and perhaps Brereton was punning on the 'swallow'). Even though harsh, the poem seems to have in it a sincere hope from an old mate that Lawson will take heart in the future, and Brereton was probably being "cruel to be kind".

When your blustering is over, and your whine is never heard,
And the manly pride you boast of is in deed and not in word,
You will know as well as I do that the world is as a glass
To the steady look of wisdom or grimacing of the ass;
But you growl, "The world is rotten,"
And pretend to have forgotten
How the ugliness of life—as you perceive it—came to pass.

The ash will never flare again; the old ideal's dead, 
And you haven't learnt enough to light another one instead; 
But when manhood reawakened, bids your canine nature shrink,
From hungering and howling at your vomit in the sink,
You may drop your tale of wrongs, And, by God, I swear your songs,
Will be better than your "Alley" hymns of "drums" and muck and stink.

December: Henry Lawson wrote to The Bulletin, date unknown but likely December:

Dear Bulletin
I'm awfully surprised to find myself sober. And, being sober, I take up my pen to write a few lines, hoping they will find you as I am at present. I want to know a few things. In the first place: Why does a man get drunk? There seems to be no excuse for it. I get drunk because I am in trouble, and I get drunk because I've got out of it. I get drunk because I'm sick, or have corns, or the toothache: and I get drunk because I'm feeling well and grand. I get drunk because I was rejected; and I got awfully drunk the night I was accepted. And, mind you, I don't like to get drunk at all, because I don't enjoy it much, and suffer hell afterwards. I'm always far better and happier when I'm sober, and tea tastes better than beer. But I get drunk. I get drunk when I feel that I want a drink, and I get drunk when I don't. I get drunk because I had a row last night and made a fool of myself and it worries me, and when things are fixed up I get drunk to celebrate it. And, mind you, I've got no craving for a drink. I get drunk because I'm frightened about things, and because I don't care a damn. Because I'm hard up and because I'm flush. And, somehow, I seem to have better luck when I'm drunk. I don't think the mystery of drunkenness will ever be explained – until all things are explained, and that will be never. A friend says that we don't drink to feel happier, but to feel less miserable. But I don't feel miserable when I'm straight. Perhaps I'm not perfectly sober right now, after all. I'll go and get a drink, and write again later.
Henry Lawson

December 8: Death of Herbert Spencer (b. 1820), English philosopher.

December 16: "The 1903 federal election was the first where women had the same rights as men to stand for parliament and to vote. Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel and Mary Ann Bentley stood for the Senate. Selina Siggins stood for the seat of Dalley in the House of Representatives."   Source

December 17: Orville Wright flew an aircraft with a petrol engine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in the first documented successful controlled powered heavier-than-air flight.

Henry Lawson poems in 1903

The Cliffs
A Voice from the City
The Men Who Live It Down
The Alleys
New Life, New Love (Prout, 1963, says this was written in 1904)
The Brass Well
Drought-Stricken
The Passing of Scotty
My Land and I
The Drums of Ages
The Pride That Comes After
The Leader and the Bad Girl
Brother, You'll Take My Hand
They Can Only Drag You Down
Exit (MS)

 

1904

1904 in literature

C/- Mrs Isabel Byers, North Sydney Coffee Palace, 145 Miller St, North Sydney

1904 - 08: Peter Lawson's poems published often in Steele Rudd's Magazine, under the nom de plume 'Skid'.

The Women's Organising Committee established, thanks to Mrs Bethel. Mrs Bethel first secretary, Kate Dwyer first president. Meetings held at The Worker offices.

Louisa Lawson published Dert and Do.

1904? Dawn office moved from 138 Phillip St to 155.

Lady Mayoress switched on the first electric street lights at Pyrmont Power Station.

1904-08 Minnie Tittelle Brune was the darling of the Sydney stage.

John Norton travelled to New Zealand.

January 5: Alfred Deakin returned as prime minister of Australia. Fingerprint evidence was first used in a New South Wales, court case, that heard before Mr LH Donaldson at the Water Police Court, Sydney.

February: Louisa Lawson wrote that "the drink question" must be settled in society now that women had the vote.

February 13: Melba appeared in the world premiere of Helene by Camille Saint-Saens at Monte Carlo.

March 4: Russo-Japanese War: Russian troops in Korea retreated toward Manchuria followed by 100,000 Japanese troops.

April: Henry Lawson was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and imprisoned. "Theatre manager Bland Holt, an old friend, paid Lawson’s arrears and the writer was freed; only to be served with a further summons. This was paid out by book collector David Scott Mitchell, endower of the Mitchell Library, Sydney."   Source

April 11 - June 14: William Patrick Crick was NSW Minister for Lands at which time he was implicated in a land-deal scandal. he resigned his seat on December 6, 1906.

April 27: The Australian Labor Party became the first such party to gain national government, under Chris Watson, when Labor members withdrew support for the Deakin government on an amendment to the Conciliation and Arbitration Bill.

May: Henry's poem 'New Life, New Love' (Prout, 1963, says this was written in this year; others say 1903) indicated Henry might have been in love with some woman about whom we know nothing. (Lawson wrote 'To Hannah' the following September, but this was about the dead Hannah Thornburn.)

I have found a light in my long dark night,
    Brighter than stars or moon;
I have lost the fear of the sunset drear,
    And the sadness of afternoon.
Here let us stand while I hold your hand,
    Where the light’s on your golden head—
Oh! I feel the thrill that I used to feel
    In the days ere my heart was dead.

June: Henry Lawson's alimony was a fortnight in arrears (£3) and he went into hiding from the police.

June 16: Leopold Bloom walked through Dublin (First Bloomsday).

June 22: Thanks to George Robertson, Lawson paid his £3 alimony arrears with money gained from the sale to Angus & Robertson of seven poems including 'The Secret Whisky Cure'; 'The Last Review'; 'Written Out'; 'Break o' Day' and 'To Jim', which all ended up in When I Was King, and Other Verses (November, 1905). Now Lawson was living at Mrs Byers's place, and reading Shakespeare, the Bible, Dickens.

July: By now, Louisa's compensation fight was mainly lost. Between 1901 and 1905 she made wild, paranoid allegations including suggestions of "a French detective in the service of a certain Government". Dawn: "Death, madness and financial ruin have overtaken many connected with this smothered-up case and Mrs Lawson's existence has been made almost unendurable, over-shadowed as she is by detectives, slanderers and persecutors of the vilest type."

July 2: Fifteen months after having been committed to Callan Park, Peter Lawson was allowed home for a fortnight.

August: Edwin Brady succeeded George Black as editor of the Labor paper The Worker.

August 5: Death of Sir George Dibbs.

August 18: Chris Watson resigned as Prime Minister of Australia. Sir George Reid became Australia’s fourth Prime Minister, forming a composite Ministry in coalition with Protectionist Allan McLean.

September: Henry Lawson wrote 'To Hannah' (Prout, 1963), about Hannah Thornburn.

November 8: Theodore Roosevelt defeated Alton B Parker in the US presidential election.

December 26: At Circular Quay (the wharf for the ferry to Milsons Point), Sydney, Henry Lawson saw a 22-year-old woman named Ettie Thrush put her five-month-old baby down and plunge into the water. He dove in and rescued her. She was taken to Sydney Hospital and attended to by Dr Vernon. (No record appears to exist apart from a reminiscence in 1922 by George Black: Henry Lawson "jumped fully clothed from a ferry boat at Circular Quay to save a girl who had fallen overboard. He made no fuss about it; neither did the life-saving society.")

Henry Lawson poems in 1904

The Women of the Town
The Secret Whisky Cure
The Afterglow
Written Out [I]
The Last Review
To Hannah
Genoa
Break o' Day
To Jim
With Dickens
The Crucifixion
The Ballad of the Elder Son
The Good Samaritan
Joseph's Dreams and Reuben's Brethren
When I Was King
Old North Sydney
And the Bairns Will Come
In the Storm That Is To Come
The Heart of Australia
On the March
Skaal
The Firing-line
Riding Round the Lines
When the Bear Comes Back Again
The Little Czar
Nemesis
Australian Engineers
Those Foreign Engineers
The Men Who Went Away (MS)
The Ministry of Men (MS)

1905

1905 in literature

C/- Mrs Isabel Byers, North Sydney Coffee Palace, 145 Miller St, North Sydney
April 4: Darlinghurst Gaol, Sydney
May-June: Mrs Isabel Byers, North Sydney Coffee Palace, 145 Miller St, North Sydney
July 24-August 17: Darlinghurst Gaol
August-December: C/- Mrs Isabel Byers, North Sydney Coffee Palace, 145 Miller St, North Sydney

From 1905, the militarism and jingoism already apparent in Lawson's writings (vide 'The Star of Australiasia', 1895) grew more strident, with overtones of religiosity, and over the next 17 years he wasted much of his talent on journalistic poems.   (Prout, 1963)

Aborigines Act (WA). The Chief Protector was made the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and `half-caste' child under 16.

The Elder Son, by Henry Lawson, book published by Angus & Robertson.

John Napoleon Norton moved to St Helena, his mansion at Maroubra Bay where he amassed statues, souvenirs and portraits of Napoleon Bonaparte, his hero. His Truth journal now had Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth editions and offices, with a national circulation of 125,000.

January 2: Russo-Japanese War: The Russian Army surrendered at Port Arthur, China; an event which shocked the world. Lawson's poem of this year, 'The Vanguard', has the Russians as the defenders of Australia against the perceived Asian threat.

January 22: Massacre of Russian demonstrators at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, one of the triggers of the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905.

January 30: Henry Lawson attended the unveiling of a statue to Robert Burns in the Sydney Domain. Soon he was arrested for drunkenness, then went into hiding for arrears on his alimony.

February 15: Henry Lawson left a note at Angus & Robertson for George Robertson: "Dear R, How will you take me – hypnotized or tight?". Some of Lawson's mates persuaded him to see Dr Arthur, a visiting American hypnotist, for a cure for his alcoholism. Henry went, but it failed. At this time, Victor Daley was dying of "decayed lungs and diseased liver". It was around now that Lawson began his drunken, nuisance incursions into the Angus & Robertson offices at 89 Castlereagh St, such that George Robertson had to get an office "in an eyrie above a flight of steps that Lawson never thought of climbing" (Roderick, 1991).

March 24: Death of Jules Verne, French author (b. 1828).

April 2: Henry Lawson was arrested for not paying maintenance to his wife.

April 3: Henry Lawson appeared in North Sydney Police Court and imprisoned in Darlinghurst Gaol for 'wife desertion', until payment of £6/12/2 was made by Bland Holt two days later. On his release, he had another summons for earlier arrears, so he wrote to David Scott Mitchell for help. On release he immediately wrote 'The Drunkard’s Vision'. From 1905 to 1909 he spent 159 days in prison. But although it embittered him, he did not come to hate the police, court officers or prison wardens. Roderic Quinn writes that on Friday nights "he would often halt at a tobacconist's, gather up several packets of cigarettes and stroll around to the Clarence Street Police Station, where he would hold out the cigarettes and stop for a smoke and a yarn. And all policemen respected him, and on meting him gave salute for salute." Sometimes men he had befriended in prison would borrow money from him 'outside'. His mates included Joe Love, the pantryman in the prison hospital, serving 14 years, and a prisoner named 'Previous Conwictions'. Mrs Byers, although poverty stricken herself, would bring food to him from North Sydney, catching the ferry to Circular Quay then walking to Darlinghurst. On one occasion when he was released, he was too weak to be taken home, and Mrs Byers took him to her brother's house and then to William St, North Sydney when he had recuperated. Lawson said his beard turned white on one of his stays, such was the stress.  See 'One Hundred and Three'. 'The Song of a Prison' (poems) and 'The Rising of the Court' (story).

NOW THIS is the song of a prison—a song of a gaol or jug—
A ballad of quod or of chokey, the ultimate home of the mug.
The yard where the Foolish are drafted; Hell’s school where the harmless are taught;
For the big beast never is captured and the great thief never is caught ...
'The Song of a Prison', "written on paper pilfered from the prison printery, With a stolen stump of a pencil that a felon smuggled for me". The felon was "a decent fellow – he only murdered his wife".

At around this time, "Louisa was engrossed with the activities of the Women's Political and Social Reform League which had as 'a primary object' the 'securing of justice for Mrs Lawson in her dispute with the PMG Department over a contractor's infringement of her patent for a new type of mail-bag buckle'."   (Prout, 1963, p. 226)

May: The Dawn edition noted that Louisa Lawson had been absent from her office "because of a severe tram accident". It carried ads for Short Stories in Verse and Prose as well as Dert and Do.

May 5: The first electric trams operated in Melbourne along a section of track between St Kilda and Brighton.

May 24: "Britain decided to continue the public celebration of Queen Victoria’s birthday after the end of her 64-year reign in 1901. Following this lead, George Reid made Empire Day a national event in Australia. It remained a public holiday until 1958."   Source

May 27-28: Russo-Japanese War: Battle of Tsushima – The Japanese fleet under Admiral Heihachiro Togo destroyed the Russian fleet under Admiral Zinovi Petrovich Rozhdestvenski in a two-day battle.

June: Lawson was selling some work to the Worker and Bulletin, and also Amateur Gardener, owned and edited by John Lockley (JG Lockley), who started with A&R but had a dispute with Robertson and set up on his own book club.

June 30: Albert Einstein published the article 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies' where he discovered special relativity.

July 1: Last issue of The Dawn. The editorial ('An Explanation') referred to her court case and that she had been "slandered and persecuted". It finished: "Wish me well". This can be seen as a kind of suicide, but she must also have been exhausted.

"Death, madness, and financial ruin have overtaken many connected in this smothered-up case, and Mrs Lawson's existence has been made almost unendurable. . . . Her health is again failing, and, as she knows none of whom she could with confidence trust to continue this journal on the unbiased and independent lines which had characterised it in the past—the independent woman journalist being almost as scarce as the good man politician—she contemplates ending her paper as she started it, quite upon her own responsibility."

"Retirement only aggravated her eccentricities. Vice-Presidency of an organization named the Women's Progressive Association failed to absorb all her energies, and she had plenty of time to brood over the way that life—and a civilization dominated by men—had cheated her. Her nerves became worse than ever; even the ticking of a clock upset her, and she banished all time-pieces from her retreat at the Old Stone Cottage, Tempe."   (Prout, 1963, 284-5)

July 6: The Reid government lost majority support in the House of Representatives; Alfred Deakin became Prime Minister for the second time.

July 24: Henry Lawson appeared in North Sydney Police Court and imprisoned for three weeks and three days in Darlinghurst Gaol for 'wife desertion', namely £12/5/10 alimony.

Louisa Lawson sometime around now retired to her Renwick St, Marrickville cottage ('The Old Stone Cottage', c. 1840) which was demolished in 1920.

August 11: Henry Lawson sold his rights, title and interest in the poems in Children of the Bush to Angus & Robertson, for £25 as he was in arrears for maintenance to Bertha.

August 17: Lawson was released from prison (see July 24).

September 5: Russo-Japanese War: Treaty of Portsmouth signed – In New Hampshire a treaty mediated by USA President Theodore Roosevelt, was signed by victor Japan and defeated party Russia. In the agreement, Russia ceded the island of Sakhalin and port and rail rights in Manchuria to Japan. These events inspired some of Lawson's poetry at this time.

September: Mrs Byers went to her brother's at Windsor, the get away from Lawson who had scared off her customers from her Coffee Palace. Lawson owed her board & lodging, and was in arrears with alimony.

October: Henry Lawson went into hiding as he had a summons out for him for £5/12/- alimony. He also had outstanding bills for £1/15/- from Ellis's Coffee Palace, 50 King St Sydney, for board and a loan, and £3/7/11 from Farmer's department store for clothes. George Robertson paid all these.

November:  Angus & Robertson published Henry Lawson's When I Was King, and Other Verses, described by AG Stephens as "the worst" of Lawson and "below his merit". It was later published in two parts, When I was King and The Elder Son. It had a mixed critical reception. Spectator and Sydney Morning Herald were mainly favourable. Stephens in The Bulletin was rather scathing of Lawson's attitudes in the verses. Lawson's mate in bush balladry, 'Gilrooney' (R J Cassidy) wrote a poem asking Henry to write happier verse in future, but Henry did not reply, until on the occasion of his 39^th birthday (June 17, 1906) he wrote "39", about "going on for forty" in a light and optimistic vein, but soon he was bitter and maudlin again. Stephens also had Louisa Lawson's book The Lonely Crossing about now to review (printed on Dawn press).

December:

"Meanwhile, reviews of When I Was King were appearing. By 15 December nothing had come out in the Bulletin, probably because Stephens had a poor opinion of the verse, and Lawson called on Archibald about a review. On that day he dropped a note to Robertson: 'From the Bulletin assurance that we shall have no need to complain and they will give us a good review. And A.G.S. will have no hand in it.' Unknown to Lawson, Walter Murdoch had that week written a review for the Melbourne Argus in which he categorised Lawson as an Australian folk poet: 'We know what to expect of him, and we are never disappointed.' Lawson could hardly take umbrage at that, even if 'Elzevir' went on to accept his doggerel on that ground. Five days later Stephens had his say. Taking the part of the autobiography that Lawson had sold to the Lone Hand, he made a novel approach to the book. He had also received Louisa Lawson's volume of poems, The Lonely Crossing. First he printed Lawson's reminiscences of Henry Albury as 'Tales of a Grandfather', then opened the attack: "It is curious to find mother and son publishing each in the same month a book of verse: to note their identity of aims, of moods, of manners—allowing for the accidents of sex and epoch. Without doubt Henry Lawson is temperamentally his mother's child.' He then asked: 'Who wrote "The Digger's Daughter"? It could have been one of Lawson's earlier verses: but it appears in Mrs Lawson's book.

"'Who wrote "The Waterlily"?' After quoting it he noted that it was 'a verse that would appear naturally in his mother's book'.

"Sensing that Lawson had fought a continual battle to rid himself of the influence of his mother, Stephens went on, not to review the two books but to use them to illustrate a theory that Lawson had 'inherited' his sympathy, his sincerity, his power of observation from his mother. After selecting unrelated lines to prove the truth of his pseudo-psychology, he kicked Lawson off his perch: 'When I Was King is below Henry Lawson's reputation, and below his merit. It was a mistake to collect in a volume so many casual newspaper verses, so many jaundiced reflections of bitter hours.' It was not the best of Lawson but was 'dismal doggerel of the alleys and the pubs'.

"Lawson had only ten days earlier written to Robertson, 'We have Stephens down: the only thing you were right in and I was wrong.' His belief that Stephens was aiming at equating him with his mother awakened the reactions that had long ago led him to brandish the bottle in a show of resentment against his mother's domination. His pen was the only weapon he had to tell Stephens and the world what he thought of their judgment and in doing so, reassure himself. In his next poem, 'And What Have You to Say?' he admitted that he 'cadge[d] from some old pal the tray-bit for a drink', but there had been days when he wrote 'for writing's sake', when he had eschewed sensual pleasures for the sake of prose and poetry. And in his final stanza he damned all his critics and proceeded to devote himself to the future of Australia with intimations of his exclusive vision of her future.

"The contrast between the prophet and the apparition reeking of stale sweat and unwashed linen, 'staggering down-hill in a beer-stained coat', was too much even for Robertson.

"Lawson perversely began to make the bookshop one of his regular haunts as he patrolled the city. Not that he often saw Robertson, for a system developed whereby his presence at the desk in the front of the ground floor was signalled upstairs to Robertson, who would disappear into his eyrie. After some years of this, the staff got used to Lawson's presence. Sometimes he demanded attention in incoherent speech and a policeman had to be called to warn him off."
Roderick, Colin, Henry Lawson: a life, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1991, pp 268-9

December 29: Lawson's friend Victor Daley (b. Co. Meath, Ireland, 1858) died of consumption at Waitara, Sydney. He earlier told Albert Dorrington that "he was getting into training for a big fight about Christmas time". In 1900, according to one source, he had been Australia's best-selling poet. The drunkard John Norton excoriated him in Truth as a drunkard and dishonest man who wrote "maudlin, metrical muck", and his friends as "bad-breathed bardic bounders", so one of Daley's mates (and a Dawn and Dusker), journalist William Bede Melville, waited for Norton in King Street, Sydney, pounced on him and beat his bare buttocks.

Henry Lawson poems in 1905

The Two Poets
The Soul of a Poet
And What Have You to Say?
The Spirits for Good
The Cross-Roads
The Drunkard's Vision
To-Morrow
As Good As New
Robbie's Statue
The King and Queen and I
The Scamps
The Men Who Stuck to Me
The Pink Carnation
The Bill of the Ages
Hannah Thomburn [sic; the compositor should have set the surname Thornburn]
The Tracks That Lie by India
The Bonny Port of Sydney
The Memories They Bring
The Vanguard [I]
Waratah and Wattle
For Australia
Australia's Peril
"The Water"
The Cliques of the Who'll-Get-In
The Federal City
The Stringy-Bark Tree
In Possum Land
The Bush Fire
"Broken Axletree"
The Heart of the Swag
To Jack
The Muscovy Duck
Give Yourself a Show
To Show What a Man Can Do
The Individualist (MS)

 

1906

1906 in literature

January-May: 145 Miller St, North Sydney
June-October: Market St, Naremburn, NSW
November: Mental Ward, Reception House, Darlinghurst

Tocsin (launched by Bernard O'Dowd 1897) ceased publication.

Louisa Lawson published The Lonely Crossing and Other Poems. In her retirement from Dawn she also contributed short stories to the Sydney Mail, Worker, Evening News and especially The Woman's Budget. None was especially good, and, surprisingly, they were rather bland as regards women's issues.

World's first life saving club founded in Sydney (Bondi). 

Driving licence first introduced in Australia.

Alfred Deakin, a keen cyclist, became the first and probably only Prime Minister to get a summons for riding on the footpath.

"Bondi and North Bondi surf life saving clubs were established in 1906, by which time bathing restrictions had been removed, and the popularity of surf bathing led to improved summer Sunday [tram] services."   Source

First week of January (?): Mrs Byers came back to Miller St, considering that she might reopen the Coffee Palace. Lawson arranged with A&R that they would meet his maintenance payments, but he was left with no other income except what he could get by selling a piece to one of the magazines. He even asked Francis Isaacs, the magistrate who had sentenced him to prison, if he might lend him some money (Isaacs declined). Henry wrote 'The Peace Maker' about now, a veiled attack on Rose Scott. Round now Lawson was barred from the A&R office. Nonetheless he came in, even on one occasion giving Robertson's client, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, William Saumerez Smith, a drunken hug in the office. Soon Lawson went again to the Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital (now known as Rivendell) on the Parramatta River, Concord. From here a month later, feeling in good spirits, he was to go to Mrs Byers's Coffee Palace at 145 Miller St, North Sydney where he had lived before. (Roderick, 1991 says Mrs Byers called at the hospital to let him know that business at the Coffee Palace had not developed, so they took a place in Naremburn. But Roderick, 1970, has his address between January and May as 145 Miller St, so I am uncertain about his address in the first half of the year.) While at Naremburn, Henry wrote 'Above Crow's Nest (Sydney)' and 'The Horseman on the Skyline'.

February 8: Henry Lawson's poem 'To Victor Daley' appeared in print.

I thought that silence would be best,
But I a call have heard,
And, Victor, after all the rest,
I well might say a word.
The day and work is nearly done,
And ours the victory,
And we are resting one by one,
In graveyards by the sea.

They dare to write about the man 
That they have never seen;
The blustering false Bohemian
That you have never been;
Some with the false note in their voice,
And with the false tear shed,
Who in their secret heart rejoice
For one more rival—dead.

So let us turn, and with a smile
Let these poor creatures pass
While we, the few who wait a while,
Drink to an empty glass.
We'll live as in the days gone by,
To no god shall we bow—
Though, Victor, there are times when I
Feel jealous of you now.

He had not joined in with the other Bulletin poets in writing poems for the recently deceased poet Daley, but perhaps he was spurred to it by an article attacking the poet's sycophants, by John Norton (himself a notorious drunk) in Truth. Norton also attacked Daley as a drunkard. "He's better dead and his death is not to be made a pretext for dropping dollops of delirious doggerel upon his coffined clay."

April 6: Miles Franklin left Sydney in Ventura for San Francisco via Auckland.

April 18: 1906 San Francisco earthquake on the San Andreas Fault destroyed much of San Francisco, California, killing at least 3000. 225,000-300,000 left homeless. $350 million in damages. The estimated magnitude of the earthquake was 7.8.

May: Miles Franklin was working at relief work in San Francisco.

May 24: The French barque Vincennes was stranded on the beach at Manly. Lawson went to see it and wrote a poem, which at first was rejected (becoming for him a symbol of his own state), but The Bulletin published it on the occasion of his 39^th birthday (June 17, 1906), for which he wrote '39' (Roderick, 1991).

June: Henry wrote "39" ("... I'm going on for forty"). His light-heartedness did not last long.

Early-mid year: John Norton, rather than attack his erstwhile partners and long-time enemies William Patrick Crick and William Nicholas Willis, who were now being investigated in the scandal in the 'Cocky' Carruthers Government, actually defended them in Truth. His motives are unclear. His vitriol was instead turned against William Holman (Labor), who Norton charged with corruption and swindling, challenging him to an electoral duel. Holman accepted, resigned on July 5 and a Cootamundra by-election was to be held on July 28. John Haynes, MP and editor of the Newsletter, hated Norton (he once told the House that he walked over worms every day of his life and scarcely noticed, but for the greasy feeling underfoot) and leapt into action to expose the editor of Truth as a scoundrel.

Mid year: Lawson wrote three letters to his erstwhile mate Bland Holt, trying to either sell  some fragments of work Holt might use on the stage, or just to borrow, or be given, a pound, saying he wouldn't drink it. Holt took time to reply, but finally sent him a pound, saying "My dear Lawson. Your note last night. Enclose the quid. Of course I know you'll knock it down, but I suppose you can't help it". Robertson decided to take a chance reprinting Henry's Children of the Bush despite the fact  that it had not sold for Methuen. By now, Joe Wilson and His Mates had been remaindered and Lawson was hard up; Mrs Byers was pressing him for rent and spending her savings on groceries. 

July: 'The Horseman on the Skyline' was published, a poem that refers to spectral horsemen coming for him.

July 14: John Haynes published a lead article in the Newsletter with the headline, NORTON, BLACKMAILER AND LEPER, calling Norton a "criminal cretin", giving specific examples of Norton's crimes. He also suggested how Norton acquired Truth: that "a man named Philp – now on the Brisbane Courier (James Philp, a member of the Dawn and Dusk club with Henry Lawson) – was able to give Norton certain information about Willis' land transactions, and hey presto! the property passed to Norton". He added the most inflammatory accusation yet: that "there is in the hands of the Inspector-General of Police, a statutory declaration, which asserts that Norton, in his house at Randwick, killed a man named Grohn, or de Groen. Grohn, it seems, came out from England with Norton on the same boat. Norton stole his money ... the allegation is that Norton hit him on the head with a beer bottle." (A brother yellow journalist of Norton's, Frank Corlette, who had been involved with the mad editor on a scheme to fix evidence in one of the many trials Norton was involved in, claimed that it was Grohn who had paid Norton's fare to Australia from England, and that afterwards Norton had robbed him of all he was worth. Corlette, and one of Norton's thugs, Edward 'Duffy' Morris, claimed to have witnessed Norton delivering a fatal blow to Grohn over the head with a bottle. Grohn, it was alleged, had also got Norton out of trouble with the Constantinople [or Colombo] police en route. Norton was never charged, but he lost a libel suit he brought against Haynes.) Unsure of date of alleged murder, but it happened while Norton was living apart from his wife who he married on April 29, 1897 and sharing a messy Randwick flat or house with Grohn. Norton and his wife were frequently separated.
  At the time of the verdict, Norton's editor was Sam Rosa (SA Rosa of the Australian Socialist League), who had to spring into action because Norton was celebrating by becoming "incoherently drunk for some days" (Pearl, 1958, p. 198). He wrote an editorial "I DEMAND JUSTICE" and signed it in Norton's name. Grohn's body was exhumed but the post mortem was inconclusive. There was strong doubt that the body was Grohn's, as that exhumed was bald, but witnesses said that at the time of his death Grohn had a thick head of hair.

August 4: Sydney's Central Railway Station was opened, built on the site of the old Sydney Yard, and the main Sydney station was no longer Redfern.

"The first Central Station opened in 1855 with one platform, the second opened on the same site in 1874 with two platforms. The third and current station opened in 1906 on 10 hectares. It has 15 original platforms. Platforms 16-19 came in 1914 and between 1916 and 1921 an additional storey and clock tower were added. Electric train platforms came between 1926-29."   Source

There have been three stations on the current site. The original Sydney Station was opened on 26 September 1855 in an area known as "Cleveland Fields." This station (one wooden platform in a corrugated iron shed), which was known at the time as Redfern, had Devonshire Street as its northern boundary. When this station became inadequate for the traffic it carried, a new station was built in 1874 on the same site and also was known as Redfern. This was a brick building with two platforms. It grew to 14 platforms before it was replaced by the present-day station to the north of Devonshire Street. The new station was built on a site previously occupied by a cemetery, a convent, a female refuge, a police barracks, a parsonage, a Benevolent Society and a morgue. This new 15-platform station was opened on 4 August 1906 and is still in use. The Western Mail train that arrived in Sydney at 5:50am on 5 August 1906 went straight into the new station. Devonshire Street which separated the two stations became a pedestrian underpass to allow people to cross the railway line and is now known by many as the Devonshire St Tunnel. Sydney station has expanded since 1906 in an easterly direction. A 75 metre clock tower was added on 3 March 1921. Platforms operating electric trains began opening from 1926.

September 10: Mohandas Gandhi began a South African non-violent resistance campaign.

September 18: Typhoon with tsunami killed an estimated 10,000 people in Hong Kong.

Spring: JF Archibald, himself convalescing at Medlow Bath following the death of his wife and the manic-depression that ensued, wrote to Lawson to keep his confidence up, adding "I am going to see that your are born again". He planned a new publication, The Lone Hand.

October: Henry Lawson was admitted to the Mental Ward, Reception House, Darlinghurst and was discharged in December.

October 22: Methodist temperance campaigner William Henry Judkins spoke at Centennial Hall, Sydney. Lawson wrote mockingly of it to Bland Holt.

November 28: William Macleod obtained Rosa Archibald’s signature and had JF Archibald committed to Callan Park asylum. "After several periods of incarceration and liberty (when he had a bodyguard), he was finally discharged in 1910."   Source

December: "The first feature film in the world was made in the bush near Melbourne and shown to enthusiastic crowds in Melbourne Town Hall in December, 1906. The film was The Story Of The Kelly Gang and was over an hour long as compared to the 10 minute flicks being churned out in America."   Source

Late November: Methodist temperance campaigner William Henry Judkins accused Sir Samuel Gillott, KCMG, MLA, Chief Secretary and Minister for Labour, Melbourne Alderman and former Lord Mayor of being the mortgagee of a Melbourne brothel.

December: Henry Lawson was discharged from the Mental Ward, Reception House, Darlinghurst. He owed rent to Mrs Byers at Naremburn and his furniture had been forfeited, so he couldn't return there. He sold a few poems to various magazines (see Roderick, 1991, p. 276). Sometimes he showed up at Angus & Robertson, although barred. Robertson offered Mrs Byers £2 a week if she would only keep Henry away from A&R. This home was to be 22 Euroka Street, Blues Point, a street he came to know well (between 1914 and 1921, Henry lived in five houses, all in Euroka Street – Ollif, 1978)   Picture of one of the houses

December 1: John Norton's Melbourne edition of Truth attacked Sir Samuel Gillott, under the head 'Lechery and Lucre'. It accused Gillott of many things, including lending money to Melbourne's most famous brothel-keeper, Caroline Poh, aka Madame Brussels who kept very large brothels that were well-frequented by Victorian parliamentarians and members of high society. (It was long rumoured that the Victorian Parliament mace that was stolen on October 9, 1891, resided at Oberton, Madame Brussels's 19-room mansion of love in Maryville Street, Balaclava.) Gillott did not deny his 19-year financial association with Madame Brussels. Other Madame Brussels premises: Sydney House (79 Gipps St, conducted by Miss Ida Nelson); Elsinore, cnr Grey and Hoddle Sts (run by the Clifton sisters).   (Pearl, 1958)

December 6: William Patrick Crick resigned to avoid expulsion from Parliament, over a land swindle. Expulsion plans had already begun and he was expelled from Parliament on December 11. (Dates from Mathews, 1987, but these do not accord at all with NSW Gov't website.) 

December 23: Lyster Ormsby demonstrated his surf lifesaving invention, the reel of rope, at Bondi Beach, New South Wales, Australia.

Henry Lawson poems in 1906

To Victor Daley
"Victor"
A Word from the Bards
In the Height of Fashion
The Empty Glass
The Bards Who Lived at Manly
The Bard of Furthest Out
The Spirits of Our Fathers
For All the Land to See
The Stranded Ship
Our Mistress and Our Queen
To Be Amused
Since the Cities Are the Cities
That Great Waiting Silence
Johnson's Wonder
Before We Were Married
Divorced
My Wife's Second Husband
My Father-in-Law and I
The Peace Maker
Keeping His First Wife Now
"39"
The Prime of Life
Above Crow's Nest (Sydney)
The Horseman on the Skyline
The Bush Beyond the Range
"Bound for the Lord-Knows-Where"
Sheoaks That Sigh When the Wind Is Still
"Bush Hay"
The Wantaritencant
A Banquet of Stinking Fish (MS)
"The Damanreadabook" (MS)
The Old Ring-Master (MS)
Sea Children of the Sea (MS)
The Newer Things at Home (MS)
Gold in Their Teeth (MS)

1907

1907 in literature

January: Market St, Naremburn
April: Victoria Coffee Palace, Little Collins St, Melbourne (Mr TC Lothian)
May: Sydney
August 6-14: Mental Ward, Reception House, Darlinghurst
November-December: C/- Mrs Isabel Byers, 20 William St, North Sydney
December 31: Darlinghurst Gaol

Rudyard Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Visit to Canada.   Source: Kipling chronology

Australian IWW 'clubs' formed.

First radio broadcast.

Alberta de Villiers MacCallum, a nurse with experience at Callan Park, was chosen by Eric Sinclair, inspector-general of the insane and one of the founders of the new "Mental Hospital" in the grounds of Reception House at Darlinghurst Gaol, to be sister-in-charge.

JF Archibald published The Genesis of The Bulletin, an important source for the history of the magazine.

Chummy Fleming invited Emma Goldman to tour Australia and had raised money for her fare but her plans to come were curtailed by problems with her love affair with Dr Ben Reitman. See 1908, below.

"Victor Trumper, a great cricket batsman was very popular. He had a sports store in Sydney where Rugby League was born in 1907."   Source

January: Henry Lawson was by now idealising his sour experience in England as a triumph, and blaming his wife for any problems there.

January 3: Although bared from Angus & Robertson, Lawson hazarded a visit to see Fred Shenstone, who showed him the door. Lawson left a note on A&R letterhead to Robertson, saying he had enough mainly old and some new material for a new volume. Robertson let the matter rest.

February: Lawson was in James R Tyrrell's bookshop in William Street, and so was TC Lothian of the Lothian Publishing Company, 49 Elizabeth St, Melbourne. Tyrrell and Lawson persuaded Lothian that Robertson was being unfair to Lawson, which was not true as he was helping Bertha and the children, and paying £2 a week to Mrs Byers. Later Lothia said he was "trapped into having dealings" with Lawson.

February 16: James Tyrrell drew up an agreement between Lawson and Lothian for a book. He got an advance of £10. Lawson now living at 22 William St, North Sydney and had been dry, but started drinking again. He had a confused pile of manuscripts and clippings, grew exasperated trying to sort them and sent the whole bundle to Lothian, who found that seven-eights of the material had already been published by Angus & Robertson. JF Archibald was at death's door at this time. Lawson revealed in a letter to Lothian sometime after this that he planned to go to England again.

April 22: Lawson received proofs back from Lothian.

About April 27: Lawson caught train to Melbourne to see Lothian.

April 29: First thing in the morning, Lawson was dozing at the entrance of Lothian's office in Elizabeth St, Melbourne, hungover. He stayed at the Victoria Coffee Palace, a temperance hotel and forged a deal with a reluctant Lothian for his copyrights (he said he needed money to get to London) and returned to Sydney after a fortnight. Some of the copyrights weren't Lawson's to sell. He apologised to Robertson, who owned certain of the material (Roderick, 1991, p. 280). Bertha and Davies, the lawyer acting for Bertha Lawson in the maintenance matter got to hear of it too, and Davies carpeted him and asked Lothian for a copy of the agreement. Lothian had to agree to pull some of the material that was already at the printer's. Soon Lawson would have enraged Lothian more, because Bertha hit him for maintenance arrears and Lawson inveigled Robertson into accepting a promissory note for £35 from Lothian, so Robertson could pay to keep Lawson out of prison. 

July: Coal Miner Strike in NSW and Victoria led by IWW.

July 24: Death of David Scott Mitchell.

About September: Lawson was not returning proofs to TC Lothian. When Lothian was in Sydney visiting A&R, he had a raging argument with Lawson over copyright matters (a story called 'The Editor of the Comet' was one of the main factors; see Roderick, 1991, pp 279 ff). Later in a letter, Lawson said Lothian had acted like "a consummate little cad". The two volumes were not printed until October, 1913.

October 23: Melbourne: About 15,000 people packed the Exhibition Building for the opening of the Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work by Lady Northcote.

November 14: 'The Rising of the Court' appeared in The Bulletin.

December 31: Henry Lawson was convicted in the Children's Court in Ormond House, imprisoned in Darlinghurst Gaol until payment made on charges of 'child desertion'; Mrs Byers somehow found the £9/17/- including costs; he was released on January 3, 1908.

Henry Lawson poems in 1907

What Have We All Forgotten?
Cypher Seven
The Cab Lamps
Macleay Street and Red Rock Lane
His Toast and Mine
I'm An Older Man Than You
Till all the Bad Things Came Untrue
The Lily of St Leonards
For He Was a Jolly Good Fellow
The Gathering of the Brown-eyed
The Song of the Doodle Doos
The Separated Women
Who'll Wear the Beaten Colours?
The Secessionist
The Country Girl
The Motor Car
Every Man Should Have a Rifle
Take It Fightin'
The Day Before I Die
When Your Sins Come Home to Roost
The Sorrows of a Simple Bard
A Dan Yell
The First Dingo
Clinging Back
Five Years Later (MS)
The Greying of My Hair (MS)

 

1908

1908 in literature

January 1-3: Darlinghurst Gaol
January-February: 20 William St, North Sydney
March 24-31: Mental Ward, Reception Centre, Darlinghurst
April: Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital, Parramatta River
May 18-June 3: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
June 27-July 13: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
August 4-31: Darlinghurst Gaol
September-December: North Sydney [20 William Street]

The Invalid and Old Age Pensioner Act provided social security for some but not for Aborigines.

IWW led a Sydney transport strike.

Mary Gilmore became women's editor of The Worker, the newspaper of Australia's largest and most powerful trade union, the Australian Workers Union (AWU). This gave her a platform for her powerful journalism, in which she campaigned for better working conditions for working women, for children's welfare and for a better deal for the Aboriginal people.

Mrs Aeneas Gunn wrote We of the Never Never.

George Robertson to a certain extent took Lawson under his wing, almost acting for him as a kind of literary agent, arranging for typing manuscripts, filing for the future so Henry wouldn't lose them, and so on.

Australia's worst rail disaster. 44 passengers were killed and 431 injured.

John Norton travelled to Britain, drunk much of the time on board and on at least one occasion brandishing a pistol.

Winter: Annie Besant, who had toured Australia in 1894, toured again. Maybe this was not her second tour. "A book of these lectures was published by G. Robertson in Sydney, later that year, and was titled Australian Lectures, 1908."   Source    Australian lectures 1908, delivered at cities in the Australian Commonwealth during her tour in the winter of 1908. (Sydney : George Robertson & Co. for the Australasian Section of the Theosophical Society, 1908).

January 3: Lawson, imprisoned on December 31, 1907 for two charges of child desertion, owed £9/17/- which was paid on this day by Mrs Byers.   Source

February: Lawson went to The Bulletin office, drunk. Enraged when no one wanted to see him, he smashed the editor's glass door with his walking stick. The Bulletin's Macleod sent CW Jeffries to appear in court and withdraw the charges, as (no doubt gleefully) reported in the Sydney Truth of March 1. Around now, Shenstone at Angus & Robertson's gave Henry £5 in return for a pledge not to come to the office until he had repaid it. From February to May, The Bulletin published a series of Henry's ballads about a mythical place called 'Virland', but editor James Edmond probably realised that the medieval character of the poems was not in keeping with the magazine's nationalism. Robertson bought them all on February 5, 1909.

March 26: In 1908 Emma Goldman, at the invitation of Chummy Fleming, made preparations to embark of a lecture tour of Australia (she was to embark on the Makura at Vancouver on March 26, 1909), and 1,500 pounds of literature was despatched ahead. In April, Fleming wrote in the Melbourne Socialist that she had embarked, believing it to be so, but events had intervened, including police harassment and the US immigration department organising her deportation, but also a fit of jealousy over her lover, Dr Ben Reitman, whose promiscuity, despite her ideology, she was finding a challenge.   More

May 16: The Commonwealth Literary Fund was established as a pension fund for writers in poverty.

May 18: Henry Lawson admitted himself to the Mental Hospital in the grounds of Reception House at Darlinghurst Gaol. He soon told Robertson that he would finish his autobiography from there, plus write a novel and short stories.

June 3: Lawson discharged himself from the Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst.

June 27: Henry Lawson admitted himself to the Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst.

June 30: The Tunguska impact event occurred in Siberia.

July 13: Lawson discharged himself from the Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst.

August 4: As Bertha was now incensed that Henry would admit himself to the Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst rather than pay £24/16/- maintenance, she took him to court again and he was sentenced to Darlinghurst Gaol charged with child desertion. He hid for four days to avoid the summons, then gave himself up. Released August 31 after Mrs Byers raised the money again, this time from Bland Holt who paid the full arrears.

August 11: Hilda Lang (Bertha Lawson's sister) petitioned for judicial separation from Henry Lawson's brother-in-law Jack Lang on grounds of adultery – he was living with Nellie Anderson at Bridge Rd, Homebush.

August 20: The Great White Fleet arrived in Sydney to an enormous welcome. Same day, while Henry was in Darlinghurst Gaol (for three weeks, August 4 - 31, over a legal notice of demand for £13/12/6 maintenance, paid for by Bland Holt), The Bulletin published an article by Lawson about his "jim-jams" – delirium tremens:

"After last Christmas holidays I was recovering from meeting up against some bushmen, whose only use for a poet was to spend money on him and make him tight. I'd just settled back comfortably to sleep when I woke with a galvanic start that jolted all my joints and sat me up.
  "It was standing at the foot of the bed. It was the usual sexless thing as to body, and grey—my jim-jams were never colored. Its shape suggested a frog upright, or some tail-less reptile, with a neck about three feet long, and the head of a prehistoric creature, wide and flat, all mouth, with a suggestion of a grin hovering vaguely in front of its face. There was also a suggestion as of hands in its pockets, after the manner of a clown in a circus; but, of course, no pockets were there. It was, altogether, a jim-jam or spook of the Impressionist School."

August 28: William Parry Crick died of cirrhosis.

"Patrick Crick, like Edward Kelly, went down fighting. He was struck off the roll of attorneys, the Full Court deciding by an overwhelming majority, that he had been rightly condemned by Mr. Justice Owen. Crick then took out a writ against the Sergeant-at-Arms who had removed him from Parliament, claiming £2,000 damages. The case reached the Privy Council which held that, in the circumstances, the House was justified in its action.

"A month after the Privy Council delivered this judgment, Crick was dead. Even his implacable enemy, John Haynes, surrendered to the general mood of 'De mortuis nihil ...' 'There was general regret,' said the Newsletter, 'at Mr. Crick's death, for whatever his political shortcomings, he was popular in his personal liberality and his hilarious nature. The one great thing that is claimed for him is that in the land troubles he had certain big politicians in the palm of his hand . . . and remained silent."

"The 'big politicians' may have been among the many Members of Parliament, including two Ministers, who attended his funeral. The church and the law were also well represented. Crick left £10,000.
From London, recovering from a great drinking bout, Norton wrote to E. W. O'Sullivan: 'The death of Crick gave me a great shock because in spite of our Truth and law fights, I always admired him, and liked him personally. He was a bright and brilliant mind, much more solid and stable than A. G. Taylor . . . But now the stormy petrel of New South Wales politics sleeps peacefully upon the placid breast of the kind mother of us all—Death.'

"Willis, after flirting with politics again, but unsuccessfully, went to England and became a publisher of cheap pornography. As the 'Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company,' he decorated the bookstalls with a series of gaily-jacketed books on prostitution, and gilded vice—Should Girls be Told, Why Girls Go Wrong, White Slaves in a Piccadilly Flat. One, Western Men with Eastern Morals, was removed from the Mitchell Library, Sydney, by order of H.M. Customs Department, that well-known academy of literary criticism."
Pearl, 1958, p. 190

August 31 Henry was very depressed and thinking about death when released from three weeks in Darlinghurst Gaol. Inspired by the example of Charles Dickens, he was planning to found his own magazine. Nine years later he even drafted a prospectus.

September 1: Henry presented himself to the Mental Hospital in the grounds of Reception House at Darlinghurst Gaol but he was not admitted as it was too soon since his last stay.

September 3: Perhaps thinking of suicide, Henry Lawson made his will at Angus & Robertson's, 89 Castlereagh St Sydney. Witnessed by Fred Shenstone and left with James Tyrrell.

To prevent misconception I wish to say that Mr Archibald (of the Bulletin), Mr George Robertson (of Angus and Robertson) and my landlady, Mrs Isabel Byers of 20 William Street, of Blues Point Road, were my best friends.
Lothian, the Melbourne publisher, has the material for a book of mine. There are many printer's errors in the copy—especially the verse—but they are so obvious that any writer with a talent for rhyming could rectify them.
I wish Mrs Byers to have all my papers and effects to keep and do what she likes with.
There is nothing the matter with me physically or mentally except financial worries.
Lay out the body decently before my friends see it for the soul was great.
Remember me to my Bush people.
Henry Lawson. Witness: Fred Shenstone.

November 13: Andrew Fisher became Prime Minister after Labor withdrew its support from the minority Alfred Deakin government.

November 26: The Bulletin published 'One-Hundred-And-Three', Lawson's desolate poem about life in prison.

Late November: Jack London was hospitalised in Sydney for a double fistula operation. He was also suffering from multiple tropical ailments. Announced publicly (December 8) that the Snark voyage must be abandoned. Published: The Iron Heel. After recovering in Sydney, London returned home (in July, 1909).  Source

Around now: Lawson tried to sell 'The "Problems"', a story that referred to Ibsen and Shaw, but he couldn't sell it because it was not seen as "Henry Lawson" material.

December 19: Lawson was very broke, and Bertha's solicitor Davies was trying to find £25 Lawson owed in arrears from September. Davies went to Robertson, who kindly had Shenstone draw up an agreement with Lawson for non-existent material for a book (some of the pieces, A&R already owned!). That agreement Lawson signed on this date and he was given £30. The book appeared in August 1910 as The Rising of the Court, which sold for one shilling and had a poor reception.

December 26: 'The Fight of the Century': Twenty thousand boxing fans watched the Jack Johnson/Tommy Burns fight at The Stadium, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney, Australia (first time ever in boxing history a black man was to fight for the World Heavyweight Championship). The fight was covered for the New York Herald by American author Jack London, who was recuperating in Sydney from a double fistula operation. The fight lasted fourteen rounds before being stopped by the police. The title was awarded to Johnson as a technical knockout by the referee. Lawson hated the mixing of the races and wrote 'The Great Fight' but no one would publish it. Lawson was selling some poems to Lockley usually for 7/6, but not much else.

Henry Lawson poems in 1908

One Hundred and Three
The Friends of Fallen Fortunes
A Song of General Sick and Tiredness
Exceeding Small
Without the Heart Behind It
The Sign of the Old Black Eye
In the Days When We Are Dead
The Song of the Back to Front
The Port o' Call
The Old Pens and the New
As It Is in the Days of Now
The Old Squire
Because of Her Father's Blood
Because My Father's One
The Knight of the Garden Spade
The Song of Australia
The Skyline Riders
The "Problems"
The Bard's Triumph (MS)
Sayonara (MS)
"He Isn't Long for This World" (MS)
There Was a Song (MS)

1909

1909 in literature

[January]: 'Charlemount' [Mental Hospital], Darlinghurst Rd, Darlinghurst
February-March: North Sydney [20 William Street]
April 6-28: Darlinghurst Gaol
September 21-October 14: Darlinghurst Gaol
December 28-31: Darlinghurst Gaol (note: another New Year's Eve in Darlinghurst)

1909 - 1914: A new market complex was built closer to Darling Harbour to replace the congested Campbell Street market. This market also provided facilities for the sale of fish, poultry and rabbits.

Old-age Pensions taken over by Commonwealth.   Source

Strike at Broken Hill, workers locked out for a year and IWW leaders tried for sedition. "The South Broken Hill Methodist Church Choir went on strike because their soloist brought along her own accompanist, clearly not a member of a union. Matters were inflamed when the church Minister, the Reverend CE Schafer, engaged a “scab organist” to fill the breach."   Source

After having worked editing labour papers in Grenfell and Queanbeyan and launching the International Socialist Review for Australasia, Harry Holland was convicted of sedition (he had advocated violent revolution against capitalism during the miners' strike at Broken Hill) and was jailed for two years. The labor movement generally condemned his actions as well. 

January 16: Three members of Ernest Shackleton's expedition, including Douglas Mawson and Edgeworth David, reached the magnetic South Pole.

February 5: George Robertson bought all of Henry's 'Virland' ballads, in 1913 assembling them (with 'The Man Who Was Drowned') for publication in 1914, but abandoned the project (Roderick, 1991, p. 288). Henry was in Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst again, reading Shakespeare. Roderick (1991) says that he could not get at the meaning of his reading.

March: Henry back with Mrs Byers, now at 143 Miller St, North Sydney.

March 26: Chummy Fleming announced in the Melbourne Socialist in April that Emma Goldman had embarked on the Makura on this day in Vancouver for Australia, but he was mistaken.   More

April 6: Lawson received a summons to appear on two charges of neglect of his children, £5 on each charge. He went into hiding for ten days.

April 16: Lawson sent to Darlinghurst Gaol again. He wrote poems at prisoners' requests.

April 20: Mrs Byers visited Lawson in Darlinghurst Gaol and was shocked by his state of mind and appearance. Again, she got him out of prison by appealing to Jack Brereton, Hugh Langwell, George Robertson et al.

April 28: Lawson released from Darlinghurst Gaol. He soon wrote a poem about "the woman who waits".

May: Peter Lawson, now working as a piano tuner and repairer, grew psychotic and was admitted at Receiving House, Darlinghurst. He was depressed and claiming that his wife had murdered his "three children" (they had five), and "the God of Daniel" had given him the information.

May: Lone Hand (JF Archibald's new periodical) published an article by Emile Saillens of France, praising Lawson, comparing him to Maxim Gorki. There was talk of Saillens bringing out a French edition. Around now, Henry, broke, again sought refuge in the Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst.

May 16: Peter Lawson was admitted to Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane where he remained until July 12, apparently recovered, and having put on nearly a much-needed stone in weight.

June 2: Alfred Deakin became Prime Minister for the third time.

End of July: Henry out of Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst and back with Mrs Byers, now catching the vehicular ferry to save the fare.

July 20: Lawson was served with another of Bertha's summonses to the Children's Court, Ormond Street. He hid for two months.

August 12: The proposed utopian community of Cosme in Paraguay, part of William Lane’s utopian ‘New Australia‘ project, was finally split up into several privately owned allotments, bringing an end to the dream.

One place he was living was William Street, off Blues Point Road, North Sydney, of which he wrote:

The lower end of Bill Street—otherwise William—overlooks Blues Point Road, with a vacant wedge-shaped allotment running down from a Scottish church between Bill Street aforesaid, and a terrace on the other side of the road. A cheap, mean-looking terrace of houses, flush with the pavement, each with two windows upstairs and a large one in the middle downstairs, with a slit on one side of it called a door—looking remarkably skully in ghastly dawns, afterglows, and rainy afternoons and evenings. [Lawson frequently referred to it as Skull Terrace. (Prout, 1963, p. 248)]

September 20: Lawson was caught drunk in a North Sydney bar. He had been hiding for two months from a summons (see July 20), so he was locked up.

September 21: Lawson appeared in court on a charge of being drunk in a public place. He was taken to the Children's Court and because he could not pay the arrears (£15), locked up again in Darlinghurst Gaol (Prisoner No. 32). His jobs included plaiting mats. Mrs Byers now living in Bellevue St, Cammeray. Henry asked her to beg money from various people, including Lockley and his mother, who had closed Dawn and was living at 'The Old Stone Cottage', not far from Tempe railway station on "the old Holt estate". His friends sent around the hat after Mrs Byers called on Bertram Stevens for help. Released October 14

September 26: "September 1909 saw Lawson in custody again. This time his condition was pathetic. A letter to George Robertson dated 26 September written on blue 'prisoner's paper,' reads:

Dear Robertson,
If the Firm cannot do anything—and I don't think will, you might know of someone who can, will, or might help, and be able to let Mrs Byers know. She is trying to get the few miserable pounds together. Please see her if she calls. As soon as I'm out, I'll go to Melbourne and work there for a while; and then try for London; it's the last chance. It is very cruel; I am getting on towards past writing age, and this is simply murder—it is killing my mind. There seems nothing for it in Sydney but suicide or a drunkard's grave.
Yours truly,
H. Lawson.
You know I was trying to keep straight."

October: "Lawson's plight these years did not pass unnoticed by his friends. Almost every demand he made on them was, sooner or later, met. This Henry, in better moments, was only too ready to admit. In "The Men Who Stuck to Me" he said this of them;

They were men of many nations, they were men of many stations,
They were men in many places, and of high and low degree;
Men of many types and faces, but, alike in all the races,
They were men I met in trouble, and the men who stuck to me.

October 14: Lawson released from Darlinghurst Gaol, went to live with Mrs Byers at Bellevue St, Cammeray. George Robertson, to ease the situation, opened a small art gallery in part of his Book Club premises and put Bertha Lawson in charge. She was being very public about her anger at Lawson, and when Robertson on business grounds suggested she be more diplomatic, she abused him.

About October 28: Bertha (who by now Henry was calling "the she-baboon") slapped another summons on Lawson, £15/12/- with costs. Lawson back in Darlinghurst Gaol. He hoped for money from Pinker, and perhaps from the French book. Again Mrs Byers did the rounds of Henry's mates to try to find the money.

"Mrs Byers came to me about getting him out," Bertram Stevens writes, "and I called a meeting of some friends at the Edinburgh Cattle Hotel." According to Tom Mutch, those who attended were Stevens, J. Le Gay Brereton, Norman Lilley, Rod Quinn, J. S. Ryan, Fred Brown. Bernard Shaw (not George Bernard Shaw), Hector Lamond, and Mutch himself. Stevens says:

I saw Mrs Lawson and she agreed to forego the amount due if we guaranteed that Lawson would leave Sydney and not molest her as he had done. We raised about £30 and I saw Lawson at Darlinghurst Gaol and offered him three alternatives—a trip around the Pacific, a visit to a station belonging to someone Robert Kaleski knew, or a visit to E. ]. Brady at Mallacoota. He refused them all at first, but eventually agreed to go to Brady's place.

Stevens goes on:

I might mention that as a reward for my trouble Lawson walked into my room at Allen's, and, without warning, struck me with his stick on the leg. I was infuriated at this, and grabbed him by the collar, kicked him vigorously, and ran him out. His grievance, stimulated no doubt by Mrs Byers, was that I had been willing to let him "rot in gaol" because he would not agree to the conditions the Committee had to impose on behalf of Mrs Lawson.

"Lawson afterwards apologized to Stevens for his action, and when Stevens died paid him a high tribute in The Bulletin."    (Prout, 1963, p. 252)

It appears that Bertha was willing to forego maintenance if he would stop harassing her, by which we might perhaps presume she means published poems and articles with veiled critical references to her, although the question is open as to whether he was in fact harassing her in other ways. As Bertha had mental problems we can't be sure of her accusations. Lawson was enraged, then depressed, that "his committee" had even spoken to her. While still in the Hospital in Darlinghurst Gaol (not the Mental Hospital outside the gaol) he wrote to Nurse MacCallum at the Mental Hospital (where "the Lawson committee" had arranged for him to go after release from prison, strongly critical not only of Bertha but of Bertram Stevens ... very vitriolic about him. This brought a reproachful letter from John Le Gay Brereton (Roderick, 1991, p.300) who "hardly knew where to start". Brereton said the committee was in a fix as they had made an arrangement with Bertha, even if Lawson was angry that they had, and they didn't want him to rot in prison any longer. It took Lawson a month to reply.

December 5: Florence Taylor (1879 - February 13, 1969), the first woman architect, structural engineer and civil engineer in Australia, flew in a glider at Narrabeen Heads, New South Wales, becoming the first Australian woman to fly. Her husband George, who designed and built the glider, made Australia's first flight in a heavier than air craft on the same day. Her husband, architect-engineer George Augustine Taylor, who designed and built the glider following the principles of Lawrence Hargrave, made Australia's first flight in a heavier-than-air craft on the same day. George Taylor, a drinking buddy of Henry Lawson's (they were both members of a small and exclusive group of carousers called the 'Dawn and Dusk Club'), and founder of the Wireless Institute of NSW in 1910, had built a biplane with a box-kite tail for balance, from coachwood, covered with oiled calico.

December 9: Colin Defries arguably flew a powered aircraft about 110 metres at Sydney's Victoria Park racecourse. However, at the time Defries’s flight was disputed. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the aviator had successfully completed a short flight, while Sydney’s Daily Telegraph said that he had not left the ground. (On March 18, 1910, Harry Houdini  flew a heavier-than-air machine at Digger’s Rest, near Melbourne, and flew at Rosehill Racecourse, Sydney on April 25, 1910.)

Henry Lawson poems in 1909

Nineteen Nine
Success
When There's Trouble on Your Mind
The Song of a Prison
Sticking to Bill
I'd Back Agen the World
The Black Bordered Letter
The Southerly Buster
The Song of What Do You Think
The Gentlemen of Dickens
The Horse and Cart Ferry
The Briny Grave
The Scots
The Little Slit in the Tail
A Bush Girl
The Poet's Kiss
The Lily and the Bee
The "Soldier Birds"
Grace Jennings Carmichael
Down The River
The Imported Servant
Billy of Queensland
Somewhere Up in Queensland
The Man Who Raised Charlestown
The Iron Wedding Rings
The Story of Marr
Captain Von Esson of the "Sebastopol"
"Fall In, My Men, Fall In"
"Here Died"
The Great Fight (MS)
The Duty of Australians (MS)
The Land of Living Lies (MS)
The Land of "Missing Friends" (MS)
A Regret (MS)
For Being Alive (MS)
Deprived of Liberty (MS)
Legal Cant (MS)
Bound Over (MS)
The Female Ward (MS)
The Dog in the Moon (MS)
Biddy O'Dowd (MS)
The North Shore Business Girl (MS)
Her Vagabond Friend (MS)
Charity (MS)
Barents (MS)
Exploring (MS)
The Something That Never Comes (MS)

Lawsons chronology up to 1889 and Henry Lawson news

Lawsons chronology 1890-1894  Lawson chronology 1895-1899

Lawsons chronology 1900-1909  Lawsons chronology 1910 and on

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