Louisa and Henry Lawson chronology
1910
and on
Louisa and Henry Lawson chronology
1910
and on
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
Henry Lawson and good mate Edwin Brady at Mallacoota (1910)
January 1-7: Hospital, Darlinghurst Gaol
January 8-15: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
January 29-February 5: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
February 6-24: 'Thelma', Bellevue St, Cammeray Park, North Sydney
Febrary 25: C/- SS Sydney, to Eden
February 26: Commercial Hotel, Eden
February 27-March: Allan's Accommodation House, Mallacoota
April 2: Commercial Hotel, Eden
May: Coleman's Boarding House, 95 Bathurst St, Sydney
June: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
October-December: 24 William St, North Sydney
Name of Patient Henry Lawson. Occupation Pote. Age 43. Sex Male. Ailment General Debelity or acholic poiserning (otherwise Booze). Treatment Whatever he asks or otherwise Blarneys for. Signed Medical Officer, Dr-----------. Nurse About all of them as far as I can see, Dr-----------. In 1910 Henry had one of his many stays in hospital, but did not appear to be unduly worried about his physical condition.
In fact a "chart" which he prepared for the benefit of his friends appears to treat the subject very light-heartedly. (Prout, 1963)
Invalidity Pensions transferred to the Commonwealth. Source
Silver coins were first minted in Australia.
Henry Handel Richardson wrote The Getting of Wisdom.
An inquiry was held after the Forrest River massacre in the Kimberleys.
Henry Lawson wrote 'The Auld Shop & the New', a tribute poem dedicated to George Robertson "as some slight acknowledgment of and small return for his splendid generosity during years of trouble ...".
The Rising of the Court & Other Sketches in Prose and Verse, by Henry Lawson, book published by Angus & Robertson.
The Skyline Riders and Other Verses, by Henry Lawson, book published by Fergusson Ltd.
Miles Franklin instructed Blackwood to cease publication of My Brilliant Career.
Mary Gilmore's first volume of poetry was published.
January 8: A banquet was given at Parliament House, Sydney, for Lord Kitchener. Lawson's skit on this, 'When Kitchener Shed Tears' (praising Kitchener and mocking the Australian armed services) appeared in the next Bulletin.
Late January or early February: On his release from the Mental Hospital in the grounds of Reception House at Darlinghurst Gaol Lawson did not return at first to live with Mrs Byers (now at 'Thelma', Bellevue St, Cammeray Park, North Sydney) but boarded with a Mrs Coleman at 95 Bathurst St, Sydney.
February 25: Tom Mutch took Lawson to Edwin Brady's camp at Mallacoota (until April/May): "Once Lawson had agreed to the terms proposed, his mates lost no time in getting him out of town. Tom Mutch went with him:
On Friday, 25th February 1910, I shanghaied him on the S.S. Sydney and at 7 p.m. or thereabouts he and I were standing at the bow as the vessel dipped and ploughed through the Sydney Heads and turned on her southward course.
"Henry was in a very morose and depressed mood, and as the lights of Sydney disappeared behind them he recited some lines from his 1908 poem "Ports o' Call":
We fear no Hell hereafter,
We hope for no reward,
We always sail on Friday
With thirteen men aboard.
"By the time they reached Eden, however, his mood had changed, and he had evidently made a resolution to do his best to 'straighten' himself out, for during his stay at the pub overnight he refused to touch anything but lemonade. Even the fact that a noisy sleeper-cutters' drinking bout was in progress all night in the room underneath failed to make him change his mind.
"At dawn he and Mutch caught a coach and went on to Merrimingo, on the Genoa River, where Ted Brady met them." (Prout, 1963, p. 252-3) Picture of the camp at Mallacoota
It has been suggested (by BS Baxter in 'Memoirs of a Pioneer Pressman', The Bulletin, October 1959), that Lawson was on the wagon for two years from this time.
Mallacoota: "There are a number of theories on the origin of the name 'Mallacoota'. Some believe that the name came from 'malagoutha' a local Ganay Aboriginal term of uncertain meaning. Others suggest that it originated from the Aboriginal term for 'place of meeting' or 'come back again' while still others have suggested that it originated from the Aboriginal term for 'place of white pipeclay'." Source
March 18: American escapologist and aviator Harry Houdini flew a heavier-than-air machine at Digger’s Rest, near Melbourne, Australia. This was probably the first such flight on the continent. The magic of flight, he later wrote, was in the “glorious thrill” of first adventure, and “not in minor modification which is perpetual in any art”. However, if 110 metres be considered a flight, Colin Defries should get the honour. On December 9 [qv], 1909, 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. The Aerial League insisted that a controlled flight had not occurred. In the five months before Houdini's success, Defries crashed on three attempts to be the first, including once at Digger's Rest on March 1, 1910. On the day before [qv] Houdini's great successful attempt, Fred Custance allegedly made a short flight in South Australia in an imported Bleriot aircraft, with a "very rough landing", but the claim has long been disputed. Houdini flew in Sydney again April 25, 1910 at Rosehill Racecourse, admission one shilling.
March 25: Jack and Hilda Lang's fifth surviving baby (6th baby as the 2nd died) was born while Jack was still living with Nellie Anderson. late 1911 or 1912 he returned to Hilda and a 6th baby was born on September 14, 1913. Nellie died in 1911 as did Jack's father.
April 21: Death of Mark Twain.
July: 'Gettin' Back' published in The Bulletin, (is this the same as 'The Girl with the Red-Brown Hair' written at Mallacoota?).
'Gettin' Back'
When we've arrived by boat or rail, and feeling pretty well,
And humped our heavy gladstones to the Great Norsouth Hotel;
And when we've had a wash and brush and changed biled rags for soft —
And ate a hearty country meal — our spirits go aloft!
(Damn the city!)When we've walked out a mile and back along the old bush track,
And dropped into the letter-box our last damned letters back;
When we've turned in and slept half through the soft white beds all night
To start, at daylight toy the coach — we're getting back all right.
(Damn the city!)When we have crossed the nearer heights through box and stringy-bark,
And traced the newer tree-marked track above the gullies dark;
When we begin to ask how far it is to tucker yet —
Where clear streams whet our appetites — we're getting back, don't fret.
(Damn the city!)We try to draw the driver out (a "case" as like as not),
For we don't know how much he knows, or how much we've forgot.
And we make bloomers, and the seats seem narrow slippery shelves —
Until we find he's just a liar, like ourselves.
(Damn the city!)When we can take an interest in all and everything,
When we begin to drop the "g" in words that end in "ing",
When good old oaths come "back again, and we can sleep at night,
And eat our fish with knives and forks — we're gettin' back all right.
(Damn the city!)I'm staying at a lake-side home, down here at Nevermind,
The small hand "separator" is the only change I find,
And there's a girl with kind grey eyes and hair of reddish gold,
And she's read somewhere in a book that poets don't grow old.
(Damn the city!)She's twenty-two, I'm forty-three; but, ere the week is done,
She's only in her eighteenth year, and I am twenty-one!
I'm younger than the younger men, who can't be young — or won't —
She heard that poets don't grow old — and now she knows they don't.
(DAMN THE CITY!)The dandy tourists wonder how the old town had got in —
The straight young bushmen wonder how that poet bloke could win.
But the grand old bush life backed me up, when they were hard to rouse,
And I turned out at six o'clock and helped her milk the cows!
(DAMN THE CITY!)
The Mallacoota visit also inspired 'Ben Boyd's Tower'.
August: Angus & Robertson published the book The Rising of the Court. It sold for one shilling and had a poor reception.
November 5: "At Altona near Melbourne, Victoria, Gaston Cugnet, a visiting Frenchman, flew an imported Bleriot [airplane] but 'struck a cow' on landing. A planned exhibition by Cugnet on December 3, [1910] came to an abrupt end (start?) when his aircraft failed to clear the fence on takeoff, fell into an adjoining tennis court and wrecked the aircraft." Source: Australian Aviation Pioneers
Henry Lawson poems in 1910
To My Friends
"Everyone's Friend"
The Auld Shop & the New
Owed (and Paid) to a Bottle
The Old, Old Story and the New Order
Written Out [II]
Do They Think That I Do Not Know? [sometimes called 'Do You Think ...' etc]
The Wattle
The Foreign Drunk
Gypsy Blood
When Hopes Ran High
The Patteran
The Song of Broken English
The Song of Many
The Men Who Made Bad Matches
"Outside"
Gettin' Back
The Bar
Did You See Us Sailing Past?
Mallacoota Bar
Ben Boyd's Tower
To a Fellow-Bard Camping Out
Bonnie New South Wales
Mallacoota West
Seaweed, Tussock, and Fern
The King [I]
When Kitchener Shed Tears
William Street
Above Lavender Bay
The World Is Full of Kindness
If They Win To-night
Wowserland
The Wowsers are Down and Out
As It Was in the Beginning
Cromwell
The King of Our Republic
At the Beating of a Drum
The Rose
The Little Native Rose
He Had So Much Work to Do
Kiss in the Ring
When This New Bar is OId (MS)
Unwritten Books (MS)
Out of Fashion (MS)
It is Not There (MS)
["To E.J. Brady"] (MS)
A Refutation (MS)
To the Land I Love (MS)
Waratah, My Mountain Queen (MS)
Wine from the Riverine (MS)
Bushman Sailor (MS)
Native Fruit (MS)
The Unknown Flower (MS)
The Bard Gets Massaged (MS)
Knighthood (MS)
After the Battle (MS)
When All the World Is New (MS)
Shades (MS)
The Spirit of Sydney (MS)
Queen Hilda of Virland (MS)
January-March: 24 William St, North Sydney
April: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
May-October: Sydney
November: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
December: Coast Hospital, Little Bay
Copper coins were first minted in Australia.
Population of Sydney 629,503.
1911? William Chidley, forced out of Melbourne by wowserism, appeared in Sydney and took up his spruiking in The Domain.
A Coronation Ode and Retrospect, by Henry Lawson, book (?) published by DS Ford.
Mateship: A Discursive Yarn, by Henry Lawson, book (?) published by Lothian.
The Stranger's Friend, by Henry Lawson, book (?) published by Lothian.
For Australia and Other Poems, by Henry Lawson, book published by Standard Publishing Co.
Harry Holland suffered an emotional collapse.
Aborigines Act (SA). The Chief Protector was made the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and `half-caste' child under 21 with control over the child's place of residence. Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance (Cth). The Chief Protector is made the legal guardian of every Aboriginal and `half-caste' child under 18. Any Aboriginal person can be forced into a mission or settlement and children can be removed at will. Source
April 3: Some 4.5 million Australians were counted in the first census.
September 2: Dame Nellie Melba began a short season at Sydney's Theatre Royal, supported by young Irish Tenor John McCormack.
September 6: "Autograph note from Henry Lawson to Mrs Lala Fisher ...
"Mrs Lala Fisher was a Sydney poet and journalist as well as part proprietor of the Theatre Magazine. She held soirees which were attended by people from literary, artistic and theatrical circles and Lawson was one of her regular guests. He wrote humorous notes for Mrs Fisher's autograph book in return for small donations. The note reads:
"Dear Mrs Fisher
I get drunk because I'm in trouble and I get drunk again because I'm out of it. Reaction I suppose.
Yours sincerely
Henry Lawson" Source
October: Henry wrote "I feel very Norse of late years". He writes of the "Norse Fore-goer" in 1912 ('The Men Who Sleep With Danger'), and cf the skyline rider poems around now, and 'Helsingfors'. Becoming very aware of his ancestry, and most likely of death. But also 'Gypsy Blood' (which supposed attribute of his he falsely attributed to his maternal line), published Bulletin, December 1911.
December 2: Douglas Mawson began his Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which lasted three years.
December 14: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first man to reach the South Pole, just 35 days ahead of his rival, Englishman Captain Robert Falcon Scott.
December 18: " ... a new service to Cremorne was inaugurated by Sydney Ferries Ltd. To serve this route five double-ended ferries were built: Kirrule, Kiandra, Kubu, Kirawa and Kanangra. Kanangra was built by Morts Dock and Engineering Company Ltd. and was launched at Woolwich Dock on 14th August 1912. Originally a coal-fired steamer she is constructed of riveted steel with wooden decks and superstructure and could carry over 1000 passengers on her two decks." Source
Late December: Henry Lawson began a drinking spree that lasted until February
12.
Henry Lawson poems in 1911
The Fairy West
A Nocturne
The Lost Punch
Mudgee Town
The Road to St Helena
The Old Head Nurse and the Young Marchioness
Australia's Forgotten Flag
The Universal Brothers
The Song of the Heathen
The King [II]
England
The Reformation of the Eldest Son
Donald Macdonell (MS)
Said Grenfell to My Spirit (MS)
What's in a Name? (MS)
Recollections (MS)
A Riddle in Remorse (MS)
The Drunken Leader (MS)
What Manner of Man Is He? (MS)
Mr Printer's Error (MS)
The Pub That Lost Its Licence (MS)
May-June: Sydney
July-August: 20 William St, Sydney
September-December: 20 William St, Sydney
Maternity allowance is introduced but no allowance is payable to Aboriginal people.
William Gilmore went to north-west Queensland. They never divorced but Mary settled in Sydney and devoted herself to Labor journalism, essays and poetry.
John Norton was at Rouen, France, for the Fifth Centenary Celebrations of the Blessed Maid, St Joan of Arc.
Sometime after the Paraguayan revolution of 1911-12, Rose and Jack Cadogan moved to Villarrica. He opened a store and she became a district nurse/herbalist. She missed Australia, but never saw it again.
Miles Franklin took part in a march conducting women delegates to Theodore Roosevelt's Chicago Bull Moose Republican Convention.
"Fibrous plaster sheets first imported to Australia. Work began on Taronga Park Zoo. Australia's first luxury cinema, the Majestic opened in Melbourne. Cost of living index was first compiled. The Commonwealth Maternity Allowance £5 per child introduced." Source
February 2: 'Black Friday'. Emma Miller stuck a hatpin in the horse of Qld Police Commissioner Patrick Cahill, who was thrown and injured.
May: Henry in the "jim-jams" (DTs).
May 23: Henry's first Bulletin verse for six months, due to being on a long bender.
August: Henry Lawson's story 'Ah Soon' appeared; it was genial towards Chinese on the personal, if not the national, level.
August 14: "Kanangra [ferry] was built by Morts Dock and Engineering Company Ltd. and was launched at Woolwich Dock on 14th August 1912. Originally a coal-fired steamer she is constructed of riveted steel with wooden decks and superstructure and could carry over 1000 passengers on her two decks." Source
September 13: Joseph Furphy/Tom Collins died.
Late in year: English born star Hilda Spong played Sydney's Theatre Royal. She liked Australia so much that she stayed for 14 years.
Henry Lawson poems in 1912
Red and Gold
Jim-Jam Land
The Old Push and the New
The Studio
Men of Hell and London East
Too Old to Rat
A Song of Brave Men
The Men Who Sleep With Danger
Helsingfors
Down and Out (MS)
"I Wish I Could Write My Life!" (MS)
To the Friends that Remain (MS)
C/- Mrs Isabel Byers, 20 William St, North Sydney
There was a Mockbell's Coffee Shop in Angel Place, Sydney.
Triangles of Life and Other Stories, by Henry Lawson, book published by Standard Publishing Co.
John Norton travelled restlessly around Australia, writing a series of 38 weekly articles for Truth about his heroes, Caesar, Christ and Napoleon, and of course himself.
February 20: Miles Franklin takes up life membership of Authors' Society London.
July 6: JC Williamson died in Paris.
October 27: The UK's most deadly tornado hit, killing six residents of Edwardsville, a Glamorgan mining town.
Henry Lawson poems in 1913
The Vendetta
The Old, Old Story
Another Song of General Sickness and Tiredness
Louis Becke
Wide Lies Australia (MS)
Along by Merry Christmas Time (MS)
January-March: 20 William St, North Sydney
April: C/- Mr H O'Brien, Eurunderee, NSW
April 22: C/- Mrs Gottlieb Wurth, 'Weinsberg', Eurunderee
May-June: C/- 20 William St, North Sydney
June: C/- Anthony Flanagan, Victoria Hotel, Mudgee
June-July: C/- Mr James E Elliott, Eurunderee
July: 30 Euroka St, Blues Point, North Sydney
August-December: 21 Euroka St, Blue's Point, North Sydney
"In 1914, some months before the outbreak of the first world war, Tom Mutch, remembering how Henry had improved both in health and outlook from his brief stay at Mallacoota, arranged to go with him on a tour of inspection of the scenes of his boyhood at Eurunderee.
"In 'Lawson; The Man and His Country,' the article he contributed to Henry Lawson, by His Mates, Mutch has given an account of that journey. They stayed at the home of James Elliott, the local schoolmaster.
"'Elliott had kept with pride the slabs and sheets of the old bark school, now built into a buggy shed, and got out with loving care the old enrolment book. With what eagerness did Lawson run his fingers down the list of names to find his own among them— 2 October 1876—the first day; Henry Lawson, nine, and Charles Lawson, seven, written plainly in John Tierney's bold clear hand! And on the same date—Mary Bucholtz, eleven. He lingered there awhile with eyes that shone.
"'"My first sweetheart," he whispered." (Prout, 1963)
At Mudgee, a few weeks later, Lawson wrote the poem 'Callaghan's Hotel'.
Direct Action newspaper first appeared, published by IWW.
JF Archibald, now mentally ill for years, sold his interest in The Bulletin.
Adela Pankhurst moved to Melbourne partly for reasons of her health, and joined the Victorian Socialist Party (VSP), editing its children's magazine. There she worked with Vida Goldstein and the Women's Political Association, campaigning against conscription particularly with the Women's Peace Army. By war's end she was living in Sydney.
Albany was the port chosen for the ANZAC fleet to gather prior to its departure for Europe.
Henry Lawson tried to enlist, in writing to Sgt Carmichael. Age and deafness against him. (Ollif, 1978)
Between 1914 and 1921, Henry Lawson lived in five houses, all in Euroka Street, Blues Point, Sydney. (Ollif, 1978) Picture of one of the houses
January 1: From the Hotel Daniell, cnr George & Adelaide Streets, Brisbane, John Norton wrote an article, 'Lux Mundi', for Truth, about his life as a crusader. He had recently lost £750 in a libel case to Benjamin Hoare, a leader writer on the Melbourne Age and a devout Catholic who accused Norton of blasphemy.
April 12 (Easter Day): At the Melbourne Olympia, John Norton addressed an audience with a speech denouncing the flogging of criminals.
May 18: Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson was Governor-General to October 6, 1920.
June 28: Archduke Franz Ferdinand shot at Sarajevo.
August 4: "Britain declared war on Germany and automatically the British Dominions, including Australia, were also at war. Recruitment began a week later and on 1 November the First Division of the Australian Imperial Force left Australia. They arrived at their training camp in Egypt on 5 December." Source
August 15: The Panama Canal opened to traffic, making the 11,300 km voyage around Cape Horn. It had taken ten years to build across the isthmus between North and South America.
November 9: "HMAS Sydney engaged the German cruiser Emden off the Cocos Islands, sinking the enemy ship in the first naval action of the war. Australians celebrated the battle as a successful test of the new Royal Australian Navy." Source
Henry Lawson poems in 1914
The Old Horse Ferry
Eurunderee [II]
The Flour Bin
"Trouble Belongit Mine"
On Looking Through an Old Punishment Book
Callaghan's Hotel
The Lady of the Motor Car
The Three Quiet Gentlemen
The Unknown God
A Fantasy of War
Dawgs of War
A Mixed Battle Song
The March of Ivan
A Dirge of Joy
Grey Wolves Grey
The Parley Voo
Peddling Round the World
A Slight Misunderstanding at the Jasper Gate
Antwerp (1914)
Soldier Libertine
Kerosene Bay
Commodore Blue
The Sea-Caves
A Mate Can Do No Wrong
Old Southerly Buster Gets Lost
The Local Spirit
Caricatures
All Ashore!
Some New Year Wishes
A Fantasy of Man (MS)
Sons of Foreign Fathers (MS)
["Christmas Day"] (MS)
"Of the Bigness of a Hand" (MS)
["A Sordid Tale"] (MS)
January-July: 31 Euroka Street, Blues Point,
North Sydney
August-September: Walker Convalescent Hospital, Parramatta River
[October]-December: 31 Euroka Street, Blues Point, North Sydney
CJ Dennis, The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke.
"Reams of his earlier work had prepared readers for the patriotic drum-beating note. What did surprise many people, however, was the bitter denunciation of the workers he had one time lauded, and his championship of discipline. The wayward, flighty Henry prating of the way he had been disciplined! But it was no isolated outburst. The puritanism of his childhood still lurked deep in Henry's soul, and a recent sojourn in the Walker Home for Convalescents had kindled in him a strong resentment and reaction against weakness—whether physical, political, or any other kind. Once again Lane's comment comes to mind:
"'I notice this about you, Arty, whenever you get into your blue fits, you always pour out blood and thunder verses. The bluer you are the more volcanic you get. When you have it really bad you simply breathe dynamite, barricades, brimstone, everything that is emphatic.'"
(Prout, 1963) Info about Thomas Walker Hospital can be found at the Concord Heriage Society
"Brisbane: Prime Minister Hughes' speech is drowned out by crowd led by IWWs. IWW's decide to 'count him down' and the audience joins in, by the number ten Hughes is speechless." Source
"Victoria region: Fruit pickers get wage increase when IWWs post signs in orchards 'Please don't drive copper nails into fruit trees as it will destroy them.'" Source
Aspro trademark registered.
Richard
Denis Meagher became Lord
Mayor of Sydney. He was preceded by Richard Watkins Richards and succeeded in 1918 by James Joynton Smith.
Meagher was an associate of John
Norton and law partner of Paddy
Crick.
January
15: Duke
Kahanamoku
(1890 - 1968), from Hawaii
performed surfboard riding for the first time in Australia, at Sydney's
Freshwater Beach near Manly Beach, on the same side of Sydney Harbour as where
Henry Lawson was living, and where he had tried to commit suicide on December
6, 1901. Sixteen year-old Isabel Letham became
Australia's first female board rider.
First Bill presented in NSW Parliament about Eastern Suburbs Railway. Not passed for 31 years.
Early in the year, Lawson (aged 47) tried to enlist for WWI but failed the physical.
John Norton and his wife Ada Norton sued each other for divorce, both on the grounds of adultery (and she also on grounds of cruelty). Norton was living with a young woman named Eva Pannett who he brought out from England and to whom he frequently referred in Truth as "my niece". Ada's lawyer, Richard Windeyer, told the jury that he would present evidence that John Norton was, among other things, a murderer, but Norton collapsed in the third day of the trial and he was never called to give evidence in the 11-day trial. As he thrived on notoriety, Norton published in Truth all the other incriminating evidence brought against him by numerous witnesses. (Pearl, 1958)
March 11: Rolf Boldrewood died.
April 25: Gallipoli. Gertrude's husband died in the landing.
May 1: The Scientific Spleen Squad.
May 31: Death of The Right Honourable Victor Albert George Child-Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey.
June 10: "... Rose Scott wrote to Louisa that she had heard some were calling her the mother of women's suffrage, but 'though I certainly worked devotedly for it – you were the Pioneer'."
July 6: Death of Lawrence Hargrave (b. 1850).
September 3: Tom Barker, a Wobbly (member of the IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labour organisation) was arrested for his anti-war poster.
October: "In October 1915 a group of 35 men, organised by the Hitchen brothers of Gilgandra, set out on a recruitment drive from Gilgandra to help in the WW1 effort. This was an attempt to change the dwindling enlistment numbers of Australian men following the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.Calling out "Cooee" and enlisting men along the way. On 12th of December the Cooee's reached Sydney with 277 men. The Cooee March was the first of many recruiting marches in this country, with recruiting marches playing a vital role in Australia's World War I effort." Source
October 9: John White, President of United Mine Workers of America, gives Miles Franklin a letter of recommendation as a militant for wage justice.
October 27: After the forced resignation of Andrew Fisher, Labor parliamentarians elected WM Hughes as Party leader.
November 19: USA: Joe Hill (b. 1879) was executed for allegedly killing two men on January 10, 1914.
December 12: The Cooee March reached Sydney.
Henry Lawson poems in 1915
The Year Fifteen
My Army, O, My Army!
Young Kings and Old
Song of the Dardanelles
A Thousand Friends and None
The Route March
The Recruiting Sergeants
The Recruits
Fighting Hard
Brother-in-Law and I
The Vanguard [II]
The Foreign Legion
Italiano
Mostly Slavonic
"Civilyun"
Optimistic
Hold Out!
A New John Bull
Said the Kaiser to the Spy
A Dirge or a Wail, or Something
A Dirge of Gloom
Archie Ward
Lawson's Dream
The Old Stockman's Lament
Booth's Drum [I]
Just Like Home
The Three Kings [II]
The Captains
Kiddie's Land
The Unknown Patient
Next Door
Architect
War on Women
Old Portraits
The Kangaroo Jack Tar (MS)
Brother Piet (MS)
January 1-10: 31 Euroka Street, Blues Point,
North Sydney
January 11-31: Pine Ave, Leeton, New South Wales
February-March: Block 418, 'Petersham', Leeton
March: Sydney? (a few days' visit)
April: Burrinjuck
May-July: Leeton
July-August: Sydney (a fortnight's visit)
August 9: Leeton
September: Sydney (a few days' visit)
October: Leeton
November: Sydney and Melbourne (a three-weeks' visit)
December: Leeton
Pictured above: William Holman
IWW led New South Wales Railway workshop slowdown.
"Broken Hill Miners take Saturday afternoons off, giving themselves a 44 hour week. Then strike for 8 hour day. Miners strike spreads to 11,500 miners demanding 'bank-to-bank' 8 hour day, virtually shutting down coal mining nationally for 2 months." Source
"In 1916, after a riot by 5,000 pub-crawling Anzacs outraged the public, Premier William Holden [sic – should be William Holman – PW] called a state of emergency and closed Sydney's pubs. This was the beginning of the 'Six O'Clock Swill'. And anybody thirsty after dark had to look elsewhere. Kate Leigh took advantage of a huge market and quickly set up sly grog shops." Source
Henry Lawson was for some time in the Havelock Walker Home for Convalescents.
William Holman, Australian Labor Party Premier of New South Wales, sided with Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes and split with the party on the conscription issue during World War I, and immediately became Premier of a conservative Nationalist Party Government.
"Trade unions become involved in the conscription debate, and there are some stop works in protest over the conscription referendum." Source
February 17: The Bulletin published a Lawson pro-conscription poem ("Conscription has to be.") that upset his socialist mates.
Easter rebellion, Ireland: Sinn Fein began its uprising.
April 9: Death of John Norton, aged 58. When he died he owned a chain of newspapers that brought him an income of £15,000 per year. and his estate was worth £100,000 – this in a time when if a working man earned £3 to £4 a week he was considered fortunate. He had a mansion called St Helena, hundreds of pictures of Napoleon and some 80 statues of the French dictator. Four times he had sat as a Member of Parliament, and three times as an alderman.
A brilliant man has passed away,
John Norton was his name;
He made the tyrants shake with fear,
The coward blush with shame.
For wowsers, quacks, and hypocrites
He had not time at all,
He hated cant and humbug,
And those who cringe and crawl.
Patrick Francis Collins ('Paddy the Poet'), 1916"Norton's death was announced in Truth of April 15, 1916. The entire paper was in typographical mourning with thick black rules between every column, so that even the reports of rape, abortion, and obscene exposure, echoed the elegiac note; sombre 12 point borders framed the report on 'Horrible Higgins', and his 'Diabolical Doings with His Daughter', a 'Diminutive Damsel Defiled and Debauched', as well as the advertisement of the Melbourne bookseller who offered the literati inexpensive editions of Maria Monk, Paris by Night, Confessions of a Naughty Boy of the 50's and The Book of Nature and Marriage Guide; and a billboard of headlines announced the Passing of the People's Tribune; Peaceful End to an Eventful Life; A Stirring and Eventful Career; Politician, Publicist, Reformer and Redresser of Wrongs; 'A Great Man Gone Where We All Must Go'.
"Norton had died the previous Sunday 'after having lain for nearly a fortnight in a paralysed condition as the result of cerebral congestion'. This was 'the most momentous announcement' Truth had ever made 'and one of the most momentous that present day Australia could hear'. Norton was 'an accomplished French scholar, a brilliant exegete, and a close student of history . . . his Napoleonic library being recognised the finest in Australia'.
"Next week appeared the official biography—which said nothing about Norton's early life—and a florid account of his funeral. His body had been taken to Sydney. At the service at St. James' Church, a 'plainly dressed, grief-stricken woman' kissed the coffin 'with great emotion'. A procession of vehicles half-a-mile long followed the 10 mourning coaches. Some people, 'so poor that they could not afford a tramfare', walked the six miles from Sydney to the cemetery at South Head. Among the wreaths was one from Hugh D. Mclntosh, one from Mark Foy, 'with admiration for a great brain', one from Mrs. Janet Gemmell ('Sydney sorrows for the workers' friend').
"No less remarkable was the spate of lush and sorrowing tributes that filled column after column in Truth for many weeks. It was only six months since, in these columns, the report of the divorce suit had presented Norton—even it his long history of villainy had been forgotten—in horrifying and clinical detail, as one of the most unpleasant creatures that Australia had ever harboured. It was only two months since Mr. Justice Pring, dismissing Norton's appeal against the verdict in this suit, had described his conduct as 'the very refinement of brutal cruelty'. Yet eminent citizens now joined with semi-illiterates in their praise and lamentations.
"'His friends are legion,' said Westralian Premier Scaddan. 'His great personality will be missed by whole classes whom he befriended,' and Scaddan's colleague, Attorney-General Walker, said, 'He was at war with every form of despotism, fraud and folly.' Mr. Richard Haynes, K.C., described Norton as 'a foe to cant, hypocrisy, and social and political humbug ... ever ready to defend the weak and support the oppressed'. Even more surprising was the comment of New South Wales Premier Holman, whom Norton had persistently and wickedly traduced: 'He was a generous man, he was a patriot, he was a fearless democrat.' This was qualified by a circumspect reference to the 'strange mental obliquity which clouded the late years of his life'. But Holman's summing-up was: 'The world as a whole is a better place for his sojourn in it.'
"From lesser-known mourners came even more eloquent encomiums. Mr. George Dobbyn compared Norton to the Duke of Richelieu; the Rev. J. B. Ronald said he was 'a facsimile of Emile Zola', who, had he lived, would have been another Addison; Mr. William Fay said he had 'given his life's blood, practically', for the people, and suggested adding his name to the scroll of martyrs that included Caesar, Beckett, Wydiffe, Latimer, Cranmer, Cromwell, Napoleon, Joan of Arc and Nurse Cavell; Mr. George Cudlipp said he was a triton among minnows and a sun among the stars; Mr. E. T. Brown said his death was a national calamity. Mr. E. McLoughlin, on behalf of the Boulder, W.A., Local No. 6, Industrial Workers of the World, said his death was a heavy blow to the 'toil-stunned multitudes of Australia'; Mrs. Miriam Goodge recalled how he had fed her six months' old baby with Mellins Food and chased two mosquitoes from its face; Mr. Rab Scott, one of the many who found prose inadequate to his grief, composed a double acrostic titled ECCE HOMO; another bereaved poet wrote a sonnet that finished:
. . . now all his tasks are done
And evildoers may just retribution shun
Now be is with Christ, Caesar and Napoleon!"while Mr. E. Laffan, of Gundagai Way, said, with a simplicity worthy of the Greek Anthology, 'Yes, he was a Carbine, weight did not stop him.'
"In this mellifluous chorus of laudation and lamentation, the Bulletin sounded a faintly dissonant note ; Norton was 'Freak big man, small man, philanthropist, scoundrel. . . one of the few orators the New South Wales Assembly has known ... a writer with a powerful punch ... a muck-rake journalist for the money that the muck-rake brings ... an editor who prostituted his paper ... a proprietor whom money could not buy when the matter had the right appeal to his boiling mind. He was the personification of heredity's problem.'"Moderate as was this criticism of the Dead Tribune, it roused his disciples on Truth to a furious attack on the 'blackguardly Boodletin'; this occupied a column, and, rather illogically, was aimed at J. F. Archibald, who could have had little to do with editorial policy, as he was then an inmate of a Sydney lunatic asylum.
"Could Norton ever have been 'as big a freak as the lunatic inmate of Callan Park, who was one of the Bulletin's founders?" asked Truth. 'The crank used to go tearing around Sydney buying diamond necklaces for flash barmaids: he used to imagine he was Moses, and was writing a new set of commandments; he drove his wife to drink, he behaved like an orang-outang at the Zoo, and, generally speaking, was as freaky a freak as was ever permitted out on probation from a lunatic asylum.' ...
"Despite his early close association with the Trades Union movement, despite his clamant and unceasing claim to be the People's Tribune, the implacable enemy of the capitalist, and the shining avatar of socialism, Norton was never a member of the Australian Labour Party. Even in its virile formative years, when it had ideals, disinterested champions, and a philosophy, he remained outside it, and he consistently attacked its leaders such as Holman, Hughes and Fisher. From its beginnings, the Labour Party, unlike the men and women who supported it, was suspicious of the Norton-Crick brand of demagogy: 'Is Truth a genuine Labour paper?' asked the Australian Workman in 1890."As Norton's power and influence increased, the organised Labour movement became more and more emphatic in exposing him as an enemy of Labour. 'For years this god of the gutter did his very worst to down the Labour Party,' said the New South Wales Worker in 1904.
"[The Worker claimed:] 'Of 2,021 divisions taken in Parliament, while he was a Member, he was present at only 384'."
Pearl, Cyril, Wild Men of Sydney, Universal Books, Melbourne, 1958, pp 238 ff
April 9: World War I: Battle of Verdun – German forces launched their third offensive of the battle.
April 24: Easter Rising in Ireland began.
April 29: Easter Rebellion: Martial law in Ireland was lifted and the rebellion was officially over with the surrender of Irish nationalists to British authorities in Dublin. "Protest demonstrations in Australia caused some Australians to be suspicious of the loyalty of people of Irish descent." Source
July?: Bertram Stevens led a delegation to the Premier of NSW, William Holman, seeking government assistance for Lawson. He received an appointment from the government to Leeton, where he was to "describe the Murrumbidgee Area for publicity purposes".
August: At Leeton, Henry got a two-acre block with an orchard, and a government income. It was made sure that it was a "dry" area, no alcohol "the driest and thirstiest I ever struck ... and they rub it into us with picture shows with screens showing the Curse of Derrink". Here he startles locals with his singing of the 'Marseillaise', and found ways to get booze. Here he was friendly again with Jim Gordon (who he bumped into in the main street of Leeton), and had a dog called Charlie. Mrs Byers ("the Little Landlady") was with him. He made furniture with just a saw and hammer, and wrote, hopeful of making a literary comeback. He walked Gordon home: "Wringing my hand almost off at the wrist he said 'Good night and God bless you – God bless us both. We are Jim and Harry again now'. Then he turned and almost ran off." He apparently deliberately took of a lot of hard manual labour and grew healthier at Leeton. He went camping and fishing with Gordon. Still, he was given to wild mood swings. He tried to resign several times (and called himself "The Commander of the Army of Fed-ups in Leeton"), used his free rail pass more than the authorities cared for, and in the end was sacked.
Leeton: "Chelmsford Place radiates out to the north. There is a band rotunda and a beautiful tree plantation. Next to the rotunda are three water towers (1912, 1937 and 1974) with neo-gothic battlements in medieval mode. Adjacent is the impressive Hydro Hotel (1919) originally built to house executives of the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission who were supervising the construction of the MIA. The building was sold and enlarged in 1924. Its life as an hotel began without an alcohol license as, at a time when abstinence and prohibition movements were sweeping the west, the town was 'dry' in its early days, much to the consternation of Henry Lawson. Lawson, one of Australia's best known poets, was invited to Leeton in 1915 to be given two guineas a week and a house in return for articles and poems publicising the MIA. He accepted and lived at Leeton from January 1916 to September 1917, publishing a number of articles, which were not always favourable. He spent much of his time here revising early work for publication in Selected Poems (1918). While there he remet J.W. Gordon (aka 'Jim Grahame') who is thought to be the model for one of Lawson's central fictional characters, 'Mitchell'. The two had first met during Lawson's celebrated outback trek in 1892-93. At that time there were 'drunks' express' trains taking the likes of Lawson to watering holes at Whitton and Narrandera. Lawson's cottage, in Daalbata Rd, on the eastern side of town, has been little altered though it is not open for public inspection." Source
August 13: Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) spoke to 80-100,000 on Sydney Domain against the war effort.
September 30: Raids on IWW headquarters and arrests of key members.
November 15: As the conscription issue divided the Labor Party and wider Australian community, and when Australian Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes and Premier William Holman strongly supported conscription, and both crossed the floor to join the conservative parties. Holman formed a coalition with the leader of the opposition, Charles Wade, with himself as Premier.
December 3: Wobblies were sentenced to 15 years in prison for anti-war efforts. Others sentenced to 5 and 10 years.
December 21: Wobblies were outlawed in Australia.
December 24: While camping somewhere near Leeton, Lawson told Jim Gordon "You know, Jim, I haven't many more writing years left".
Henry Lawson poems in 1916
Black Bonnet
The Sacrifice of Ball's Head
Leeton Town
A Song of Yanco
"Arrers"
The Return
Conscription
The Portugee
Billy Boy
The Lone Mate
In Flanders
Women and Children Again
To Roumania
A Few Remarks Concerning A Bear
The Calling of the Gods
Lowe and Bee Hold
Advertisement for Hean's Essence
The Passing Stranger at Burrinjuck (MS)
A Leeton Marching Song (MS)
Old Joe Hunt (MS)
Lest Dogs Defile! (MS)
Interlude: Anecdotes on Lawson's poverty and cadging in his later life
"In some of his verses, Lawson showed a similar lack of reticence about other experiences at this period, which, since they concern others and show him in a rather unfavorable light, as though glorying in his distressful state, a breach of good taste. 'The Poet's Kiss,' is an example. It deals with the life of a small 'freckle-faced' girl with 'large, sad, grey eyes,' who works as a drudge on an outback farm. An avid reader of The Bulletin, she conjures up a romantic vision of one of its contributors—a poet.
There was a bard, who sang the Bush,
The ocean wide and wild,
The bushmen and the city push—
She'd read him when a child;
He sang of Hope and Grim Despair
Of backs bent to the rod,
Of fights for freedom everywhere,
And, Oh, he was her god.
She pictured him with burning eyes,
And heavy hair thrown back,
From gloomy brows so worldly wise
And sadly on the rack,
A wasted form—transparent hands
That angels might caress,
A heart that ached for many lands
And clean but careless dress.
"The poem goes on to tell how the girl goes to see her poet in Sydney.
She found him too, no matter how,
Nor does it matter where;
The gloom upon his grimy brow
Was hidden by his hair.
The poet's words were thick and slow
The poet's chin was slack;
His bloodshot eyes were burning, though
And one of them was black.His clothes were careless, right enough,
But they were far from clean,
And he was briefly—in the rough
The Man He Might Have Been.
He heard her worship with a laugh
Her sorrow with a frown
He scrawled a drunken autographAnd borrowed half-a-crown.
The sky is lead—storm waters whirl,
Down gullies deep and dark,
And there's a disillusioned girl
Far out at Stringybark.
And, after all, there is a chance,
This IS a song of woe—
Twas sung to buy a pair of pants,
And that is all I know.
"Unfortunately, this was not a fictitious incident invented by the poet. And there were other incidents that appear to have been just as regrettable. Bertram Stevens says:
On one occasion I introduced him to a man from the country, who admired his works and said so. Lawson borrowed my pen and a piece of paper straight away, wrote for half-a-minute, and then handed the paper to the countryman. It was an I.O.U. for l/6d, which the surprised visitor promptly handed over. It is impossible to measure Lawson by conventional standards of conduct. He is unique.
"If C. H. Bertie is to be believed, Stevens himself was the victim of a similar trick of Lawson's. A friend of Stevens's, a well-known poet who was over in Sydney on a visit, wanted to meet Lawson. Stevens arranged for Lawson to call on the visitor and gave him a note of introduction.
Lawson called on the poet, but prolonged his visit to such an extent that at last the host turned up the corner of Stevens's note and wrote "Why did you send this nuisance to me?" He put it in an envelope and addressed this to Stevens asking Lawson to deliver it. Half an hour later, Lawson was back. Underneath the note was written: "Give him 5/- and you'll soon get rid of him." The poet paid up, and on meeting Stevens soon after, reproached him for sending such a message.
"Why," replied the astonished Stevens, "your note never reached me."
"When his need for money was acute, Henry was ready to devise any expedient short of crime to obtain it. George Robertson tells of one such ruse:
In urgent need of five shillings he [Lawson] conceived the brilliant notion of disposing of his own skeleton to Dan. The grim joke was just the sort to appeal to both. An agreement was drawn up and duly witnessed.
"Vance Marshall also tells of a visiting journalist who was introduced to Lawson.
"Mr Blank," Henry was told, "says he would give ten years of his life to shake hands with you."
"No need for him to be too extravagant," was the reply. "Tell him it will only cost him five bob."
"And," Marshall nys, "with barely a flicker of a smile, Lawson collected from his flabbergasted admirer."
"During 1908, Henry made such a nuisance of himself in the shop of Aligns and Robertson Ltd.. that George Robertson offered him five pounds if lie would promise never to visit the establishment again until it was repaid. The money was paid over and the following agreement signed:
Messrs Angus and Robertson:
I hereby agree and promise that I will not enter your Castlereagh establishment until I have repaid at your publishing house, 46 Park Street, the sum of £5 lent to me this day.
(Signed) Henry Lawson
7/4/1908.
"Within an hour and a half of signing the agreement, Henry was in the shop again.
"One method of Lawson's when his money ran out during a spree was to induce one of his mates to advance him a loan if he composed a poem then and there. His charges for such a composition ranged from five shillings to a pound.
"In the collection of Lawson's manuscript poems which John Lane Mullens presented to the Mitchell Library is a pencilled manuscript entitled, 'It Is Not There,' which Henry is said to have written at the bar counter at Minty's Hotel in Bathurst Street in August 1910.
"The following stanzas give an idea of its nature:
It is not on the summer sands
Of Fashion where no heart is stirred
Nor where the tall Australia stands—
It is not there my songs are heard.
'Tis not in Pitt, nor Collins Street
Nor on the Point, nor in Toorak,
Nor where all Wealth and Fashion meet
But in the Lane and on the Track ...
Prout, Denton, Henry Lawson: The grey dreamer, Rigby Ltd, Adelaide, 1963. pp 244 - 246
January-March:
Leeton
March 7: Sydney (3 days)
March 10: Leeton
April 9: Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital, Parramatta River
April 11: North Sydney Police Station
April 23-August: Leeton
September: 26 Euroka Street, Blues Point, North Sydney
October: Thomas Walker Convalescent Hospital, Parramatta River
November-December: North Sydney
Despite widespread repression, the IWW helped lead the General Strike.
Daylight saving introduced to Australia (unpopular and not reintroduced until WWII).
Holden Motor Body Builders established a factory in Adelaide.
Les Darcy and Frederick McCubbin died.
Henry Lawson wrote an endorsement for the politician Tom Mutch, who was later twice Minister for Education. Henry Lawson claimed at some time never to have voted in his life, but he also wrote verses for politician Cecil Murphy.
While the play While the Billy Boils was running in Sydney, Lawson contracted an endorsement with the makers of Hean's Cough Diamonds and Hean's Essence. The consequent ad had a blurb about the play and a silly original Lawson jingle. On another occasion he was engaged by the manufacturer of a rheumatism remedy to write an endorsement; his copy read "I find your rheumatic cure excellent for lighting fires and oiling boots with"; they used different wording in the ad.
c. January - March: Mary Gilmore visited Henry Lawson and Jim Gordon at Leeton.
Early in the year (?): Henry made another attempt to enlist, as a medical orderly. Being deaf, he was again rejected.
January 22: death of Emma Miller.
At the general election in March, former Labor Premier William Holman was elected as a Nationalist Party of Australia candidate, and continued in the Premier's role.
March 30: The Bulletin published 'Travellin'', a reportage sketch by Lawson of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, with 'In a Dry Season' (1892), which he wrote from Bourke many years earlier.
August
5: Great Strike of 1917 – "Sydney’s workplaces were in turmoil for ten weeks. Eventually the strike spread to other states, but it was most concentrated in Sydney. The 1917 strike is an important story in Australia’s history, but it was played out with more intensity in a place like Pyrmont than almost anywhere else.
On the 5th of August workers at the Darling Harbour goods yards started to go out.
The seamen followed and then the wharf labourers, so that by the 15 the wharves
were idle. The introduction of volunteer labour to unload the sugar ships led to the
CSR carters going out, and the endless clip clopping of their Clydesdales along Harris
Street died away. This strike is written large in the memories and the records of the
place. ‘Dad was out in the 1917 strike’ an old resident told me. ‘Everyone
was’… And just about everyone was, including all the block boys who worked for the City
Council – the sparrow starvers they were called, because their job was to sweep up
the horse shit from the streets, methodically, block by block. The trigger for this
show of solidarity by the city’s kids with their fathers is unclear, but the Town Clerk
reacted swiftly to their striking by sacking the lot of them. And this would have
deprived many inner city households of the only small amount a steady money coming
in ...
"... the shooting of Merv Flannagan. Flanagan was on strike from the CSR, and had got himself into an altercation on
Pyrmont Bridge Road with some blacklegs who had just delivered a cart-load of jam
to Birt’s wharf. The jam was ‘for the troops at the front’ claimed the SMH under a
headline that screached [sic] ‘Mob Assaults Loyalists’. There was no ‘mob,’ and both
sides were fairly evenly balanced, except that one of the loyalists, Reg Wearne, had a
revolver. Wearne also had a brother who was a member of parliament, which helped.
"He fired his revolver twice, wounding one man in the leg, and hitting Flanagan in the chest. Flanagan died on the way to hospital. At the coroner’s inquest, Wearne was
found to have acted in self-defence and the case was dismissed in the Newtown Court. At the end of 1917 a trade union film was made called “The Great Strike’.
But screening was banned under the War Precautions Act, and when the ban was lifted it was with two conditions. That the title be altered to ‘The Recent Industrial
Happenings in New South Wales’ and that the killing of Flanagan be deleted from the
footage."
From 'History? You must be joking'; speech by Dr Shirley Fitzgerald, the City Historian for the City
of Sydney PDF
August 26: William Lane died in Auckland from bronchitis and a weak heart. "This journal has lost a great editor and the country a great Imperialist", said the editorial in the New Zealand Herald. On this day, John Lane was schoolteacher at Yandina, Queensland.
August 27: IWW made illegal in Australia and membership rolls made available to employers.
October (1916 or 1917? Prout, 1963 is unclear): Ann announcement was made that a dramatisation of some Lawson sketches would be presented under the name of While the Billy Boils, Beaumont Smith, dramatist. (In 1921, Smith made While the Billy Boils into a movie, starring Henry Lawson.) It played at the Theatre Royal. The Sydney Morning Herald critic wrote: " ... at the closing of an enjoyable evening of sentiment and humour and melodrama, Beaumont Smith responded to the calls of 'Author' with a eulogy upon Lawson, and an explanation of his absence at Yanco [near Leeton]". At some stage, Lawson did go to Sydney to see the show, and was critical of the un-bushmanlike way the city actors made a fire to boil the billy.
December 20: Death of Frederick McCubbin.
Henry Lawson poems in 1917
England Yet
The Ballad of the Hundred and Third
Scots of the Riverina
Romani
Don't Worry, Little Woman!
Ripperty! Kye! Ahoo!
Booth's Drum [II]
Gypsy Yet
The Lovable Characters
Posts and Rails
Evatt's Block: A Drone of the Irrigation Area
The Absent Jack
The Friendless One
The Right-O Girl
The Mucklebraeans
The Old Trouble
Paddy-the-Ram
Billo's Point of View
Hawkers
A Mixed-Up Business (MS)
Auld Scottish Sangs (MS)
Jack Kirkland (MS)
The Song of the Kaiser's Mo' (MS)
Uncle Samuel (MS)
Russia 1917 (MS)
The Ballad of the Casual Lunatic (MS)
I Read A Song (MS)
Mostly Matrimonial (MS)
C/- Mrs Isabel Byers, 28 Euroka Street, Blues Point, North Sydney [Note that the various Euroka Street addresses vary, which comes from moving around in the same street, but as far as I know might also be due to his misaddressing the letters)
In the Northern Territory the Aborigines Ordinance forbade mining on Aboriginal Reserve Land.
The building of six repatriation wards at Callan Park commenced with Commonwealth/State funding. History of Callan Park Hospital More
(?) Arthur Desmond died, but was also said to be alive and running a bookshop in Chicago in the 1920s.
May Gibbs wrote Snugglepot & Cuddlepie. Norman Lindsay wrote The Magic Pudding.
Henry Lawson's book Selected Poems was published, with an adulatory preface (emphasising Lawson's militarism and ignoring his earlier radicalism) by poet David McKee Wright, containing 46 poems of which 70 per cent dates from 1900 or earlier. Lawson, having returned to Sydney from Leeton, was soon unwell again. Much of his time now was spent on the street looking for money and or a drink. He spoke little with people because he was now very deaf. He had premonitions of death. (Prout, 1963) He wrote 'Wide Spaces' now:
When my last long-beer has vanished and the truth is left unsaid;
When each sordid care is banished from my chair and from my bed,
And my common people sadly murmur: " 'Arry Lawson dead," ...
Alarmed, JF Archibald, publisher of The Bulletin, offered Lawson the use of his cottage at Port Hacking, but Archibald died (September 10, 1919) before Lawson took advantage of the offer.
March 18: Miles Franklin had an attack of malaria in England and
became a patient of Sir James
Cantlie, specialist in tropical medicine.
Henry Lawson poems in 1918
At The Sign of the Rotten Egg
The Cockney Soul
Wide Spaces
The Tragedy
Absolution - for the Woman
Forgiveness - for the Strollers
Those Messages from Mars
The King His Crown
The Belfries of Strassburg
Peace?
The Scandal (MS)
May 5: 30 [31?] Euroka Street, North Sydney
May 27-December: 31 Euroka Street, North Sydney
Influenza epidemic of 1918-19 caused nearly 12,000 deaths.
The Potts cartoon strip began.
Even in 1919, Lawson still addressed the former editor as "Mr Archibald".
March 12: Death of Ruby Lindsay (Spanish flu).
March 24: The 'Red Flag Riots', Merivale Street, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
September
10: Death of JF
Archibald (b. 1856),
publisher and editor of The
Bulletin. Large parts of his last years were spent at Callan
Park Mental Asylum. He left an estate worth £80,000.
History
of Callan Park Hospital More
Pictured: Archibald of The Bulletin
September 18: Lawson's tribute to Archibald appeared in The Bulletin.
October: Lawson wrote to George Robertson that he was "going south to the Murray," but on November 11 he was back at Euroka Street having "landlord trouble" and wrote again:
Dear Robertson,
Working well. Landlord on the mat—a matter of three weeks at 12/6 per week. Can't work under these circumstances. About 30/- will cover it. Any good sending in Mrs Byers? (Prout, 1963)
"Henry must have been a difficult person to live near during this time. For all her intended kindness, Mrs Byers often drove him frantic. She interrupted his writing frequently with petty household problems. In May, for instance, he apologized to Archibald for the blots on his letter, which were caused 'by Mrs Byers coming sudden for about the fifth time—to ask me if I seen her blarsted flat iron'. In his more morose moments, the Little Landlady's volubility, which apparently even the barrier of his deafness could not shut out, was apt to flick him on the raw; in about November of that year she plagued him for days with complaints about the "wretched condition of her stays," until, somehow or other, he raked together enough money to buy her a new pair. Mrs Byers was becoming increasingly forgetful as she aged. Once she left a parcel of eggs on Henry's bed. Henry, who had just washed and pressed his only pair of pants, sat on them. 'Did they hatch?' Mrs Byers asked him. " (Prout, 1963)
October 7: Alfred Deakin died.
December 5: Henry Lawson scribbled out further instructions for his will ... half of any royalties to Mrs Byers, the other half to his son 'Jim'. Part of the will written on the back of a notice advertising a new book, The Art of Arthur Streeton. A sidenote mentions that "Mother doesn't want money" and that he intends to visit her on New Year's Eve, the anniversary of Peter Larsen's death.
Henry Lawson poems in 1919
Victory
The League of Nations
When You Get That Kindly Feeling
"Shut Your Head!"
England's Work
Archibald's Monument
Chatswood
"Pictures"
Mixed
The Township
The Row at Ryan's Pub
Dog Battler
January-March North Sydney
March 16-24: C/- Mr JA McManus, Storekeeper, Coolac, NSW
April 3: Ashfield
April 12-May: 31 Euroka Street, North Sydney
June 7-17: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
June 22: North Sydney
June 25-July 6: Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst
(Gaol)
August: 33 [31] Euroka Street, North Sydney
During the 1920s, several hundred buildings at The Rocks were demolished during the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Melba appeared on a pioneering radio broadcast from Guglielmo Marconi's factory in Chelmsford, England.
January 7: Sir Edmund Barton, first Prime Minister of Australia, died.
March 16: Henry Lawson departed Sydney, his friends having arranged for him to rest at Coolac, near Gundagai, where he stayed with Alick McManus, a local storekeeper. On his return to Sydney, this was his worst street-wandering and begging time, haunting the premises of The Bulletin and The Worker. This trip said to have been the inspiration for 'On The Night Train' (see below, 1922), the original version of which has 16 stanzas.
March 18: Henry Lawson wrote from Coolac to fellow poet CJ Dennis: "Dear 'Den', I've been sentensed [sic] to six months in the Bush again in my old age; and am fairly hard up of course -- I don't know whether your tremendous success has made a millionaire or a dead broker of you; but if you can do it you might float me a small loan to get a few Bush things as I have only one suit of city clobber and am ashamed to go about. Of course you will guess that I'm not in the habit of writing letters like this -- abt 6 in my life, and all to friends and relations -- but the case is rather urgent. I'd rather go shabby in Sydney than have no change of shirt &c, or knock-about clothes here ..." Photo of letter
June 7: Admitted as 'John Lawrence' to the Mental Hospital, Darlinghurst (Gaol), Lawson wrote a letter headed 'Brain Infirmary, next the Rat Joint, Darlinghurst – Royal Horrors Department'. Later names he used as addresses on his letters included 'Royal Rat Joint, Sydney'; 'The Training Hospital for Nurses and Patients'; 'Hunt-fleas House'; 'Hunt-fleas-ian Hall'.
July 5: Lawson wrote a letter to George Robertson. Excerpt:
Similiar,
Similiar,
Similiar.
Damn the Date.
Dear Robertson
But this Chapter concerneth an Encounter with the Head Nurse—the forerunner of many. I rehearsed the attack with "Griffirth". I asked him if he thought it would be safe. He said that Nurse Huntfleas (the Head) would be safe (that isn't her name), but he didn't know about me.
(Enter Nurse H. at 6 a.m. (as usual). She's taller and bonier than I am, but I think she shaves):
H.L.: Good morning, Nurse Huntfleas.
N.H.: Good morning, Lawson. (She speaks high-flown like.)
H.L.: And how are you this morning, Nurse Huntfleas?
N.H.: As I always am.
H.L.: And did you sleep well?
N.H.: I always sleep well.
H.L.: And your appetite—?
N.H.: My appetite is always good.
H.L.: And is your bow — I mean — er — !
N.H.: Whot (machine-gunfire) Do You Mean?
H.L.: I mean — er — Do you want an experience — er — experiment?
N.H.: I'll have the experiment and you shall have the experience, Lawson. By the way, I forgot to get in that bottle of ale that Sister ordered. But I'm thinking you won't need it after last night.
(On the mat, before Sister.)
H.L.: Well, look here Sister. All those young nurses of yours ask us if our bowels is open, and sich-like delicate questions. And, wot's more, they writes it down in a book. Fancy people getting holt of an' readin' that book when I'm under my monument! And the way Nurse Huntfleas looks at us is enough to make our ******!Just as I turned hopelessly to the wall about 9.30 p.m. a bony finger touched me on the shoulder, and turning as the spook vanished, I saw a brimming glass of lager and a plate of bread and butter on the table. Them sort of Head Nurses often know more than all the doctors put together and are white when they're wanted.
Yours,
Henry LawsonRoderick, Colin, Henry Lawson Letters, 1890-1922, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1970
July 12: By now, Henry had been discharged from the Mental Hospital, attached to Darlinghurst Gaol.
August 12: Louisa Lawson died in Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane, with only her son Peter to benefit by the will (made in 1919), the estate being worth £628. She was buried in a pauper's grave. Her son Charles had looked after her in last years, and son Peter had kept in touch; Henry had not.
"Towards the latter part of her life her interest in spiritualism, it seems, revived. Strange voices pestered her in her solitude, and she frequently complained to friends "that the voices of convict servants kept her awake crying from the trees of her garden."
Most mothers derive consolation in their declining years from their children and grandchildren. Not so Louisa. Henry's visits were now very infrequent, mostly restricted to occasions such as the anniversary of Peter's death. According to Sylvia Lawson, she "expressed extreme dislike and disapproval of him in later stages" and "her disapproval and dislike of Mrs Henry, when that lady had him several times gaoled for failure to maintain and so on, were even stronger."
Her son Charles and her daughter Gertrude, it is said, did all in their power to help her, but their efforts evoked little response or thanks.
And so, aged seventy-two, lonely, embittered, and still blindly battling for she knew not what, Louisa died, all her high hopes unfulfilled. In a poem, "The Hour is come," which she had written many years before, are some lines that might serve as her obituary:
"How did she fight?" She fought well. "How did she light?" Ah, she fell. "Why did she fall?" God, who knows all, Only can tell.
A poem Henry wrote as a tribute to his mother seems to be a perfunctory piece of work. The Louisa of the poem is not the loving maternal figure one would normally expect to be recollected by a bereaved son; it is an earlier Louisa—the bush girl who had ridden the ranges before he was born:
I might have raved in verse and prose The wrongs of one bush-woman dead. To shame the smug, smug smiles of those Who sit in peace where tape is red; I might have sung a song of pride For things their soul shall never know, I only see a bush-girl ride Through rugged ranges long ago.
September: A poem by Peter Lawson was published in The Bulletin. He might have used the pen-name 'Skid'.
Sometime after Louisa Lawson's death, Ross's Monthly ran an article, 'Life and Louisa Lawson', in which she was described as 'Australia's most able woman'.
November 6: Henry Forster, 1st Baron Forster of Lepe (January 31, 1866 - January 15, 1936) assumed office as Australia’s eighth
