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Almost everyone in Australia knows of Henry Lawson, but who knows about him?

If Henry is even taught these days – and I can scarcely recall this famous Sydneysider being mentioned in my 13 years of schooling in Sydney, nor in three years of studying literature and history at university – I doubt that he is taught as anything but the bushwhacker he is always portrayed as in the media.

Australian politicians and educators, particularly conservative ones, tend to promote the myth of Henry Lawson as a homespun rural author, and consequently, although there is some truth in it, a bucolic view of Lawson is very widespread – he’s been washed in billy tea and eucalyptus antiseptic.

He was indeed reared in the bush, but from the age of 17 till his death at 55, excluding two tumultuous years in London, and brief periods in New Zealand and interstate, Henry Lawson spent virtually all of his time living in a multitude of different houses, flats, boarding houses, pubs, prisons, rehabs and mental asylums in Sydney, which was a bustling world city twice as populous as San Francisco in Lawson’s heyday 1890s. In the Big Smoke he mixed with the bohemian and (often extremely) radical artists, intellectuals and activists of the era.

About a century ago he was not only Australia’s best-selling writer, he was probably, alongside opera diva Nellie Melba, the nation’s best-known person. More recently, his profile appeared on the $10 note, just as his one-time lover, the utopian socialist and later Communist Party member Mary Gilmore's strong face now appears on it (with Lawson's mate and copyright lawyer, Banjo Paterson, on the reverse). Today, Lawson is not forgotten, but he is mostly unknown.

Yes, I said his lover: Australia’s most famous female poet Dame Mary Gilmore (she was Mary Cameron when Henry asked her to marry him). They didn’t teach us at school about this love affair, and they didn’t teach us about the huge commune she lived in, nor how famous and important that commune was at the time.

Nor did they teach us about Henry and Mary’s associations with seditionists, anarchists and terrorists, nor the connections of at least two Australian prime ministers and at least two NSW premiers with that same circle of radicals.

Number 138 Phillip Street in Sydney is today a new, multi-storeyed city building with no plaque out the front telling of its famous former residents. Here it was that Henry’s mother Louisa Lawson, who was called by NSW suffragettes “the Mother of Women’s Suffrage”, settled with her four children in 1883 after she broke up with her Norwegian husband. These children were Henry, Charlie, Peter and Gertrude. Of this family of five, only Gertrude and Henry never spent long periods in Callan Park Lunatic Asylum for the Mentally and Criminally Insane – one of the few mental hospitals of Sydney in which Henry was only a visitor and never a patient. During much of this period, Charlie was in prison, for he was criminally insane.

It was in Phillip Street that Louisa and Henry started editing the progressive journal The Republican, and where in 1888 Louisa founded her feminist journal, The Dawn. The all-male New South Wales Typographical Association enacted a boycott because she used female labour, but she managed to publish The Dawn for 17 years with the aid of other women and sometimes her famous son. Out of this project grew the Dawn Club, which soon spawned the Womanhood Suffrage League. Partly because of her efforts, it was Australian women who first had the right to both vote and stand for election – the first in the world.

It was at 138 Phillip Street that Mary Cameron boarded for six weeks in early 1890 while her journalist mother was away in Junee, NSW. In March Louisa sent Henry packing to Western Australia when she discovered some funny business between Henry, aged 22, and Mary, 24. The night before “the Pote of Australia” steamed out on the SS Australien bound for Albany at his strict mother’s behest, he proposed to Mary Cameron, but she wisely refused this destitute, green, bibulous immature writer. After Henry’s death in 1922, Mary claimed that Henry’s sister Gertrude told her that while he was in WA, Louisa intercepted Henry's letters to Mary. (This was years before Gertrude’s wrist was broken in a violent struggle with her deranged mother.)

While Henry was jobbing in WA with his brother Peter, he was relatively untouched by the 1890 Maritime Strike, when military units were extensively used against strikes in New South Wales and Victoria. Armed troops were deployed in Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, and a number of other ports around Australia. In Melbourne the announcement that a public meeting was going to be held on August 31 to support the maritime strikers sent the Victorian government into panic mode. One thousand military volunteers were addressed by Colonel Tom Price: "You will each be supplied with forty rounds of ammunition and leaden bullets and if the order is given to fire, don't let me see one rifle pointed up in the air. Fire low and lay them out."

Machine gun nests were mounted behind Parliament House. Regardless of the danger, and despite the intimidation, 60,000 protesters attended the meeting the next day. Likewise, Sydney in the early 1890s had its William ‘Machine Gun’ McMillan, a State minister who Premier Sir Henry Parkes had to chastise for his readiness to gun down protesters.

They never taught us this.

On September 30, 1890, Henry Lawson set sail back to Sydney on the steamer Salazie. He was broke and depressed, and knew nothing of the industrial turmoil that was going on in Melbourne and Sydney during his absence. It was just a fortnight or so before the Knights of Labor secret society was co-founded in Sydney by an associate of Henry’s and Mary’s, Larry Petrie – a one-armed firebrand Yank who had also co-founded the Melbourne Anarchist Club in 1886. Henry joined Petrie’s American Masonic-like secret lodge, as did some of the founders of the Australian Labor Party, such as George Black. (It is because of Knights of Labor that since 1892 the Australian labour movement has used the American spelling of ‘labor’.)

Within two years, Henry was working in Brisbane on the leftist Boomerang newspaper and was close to editor William Lane, the most prominent name in the Australian labour movement at the time. On May 16, 1892 Henry, inspired by the shearers' strike, published in Lane's other paper, The Worker, 'Freedom on the Wallaby', the last stanza of which read:

So we must fly a rebel flag,
As others did before us,
And we must sing a rebel song
And join in rebel chorus.
We'll make the tyrants feel the sting
O' those that they would throttle;
They needn't say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle!

Henry found his name mentioned angrily in Queensland’s Parliament very soon afterwards; he was denounced as a danger to the State and there were calls for him to be charged with sedition.

Somehow, we weren’t taught this either.

Late in 1892, Jules François Archibald, the co-founder and editor of The Bulletin, sent Henry to Bourke, New South Wales, with a one-way ticket and five pounds in his pocket, in order to get some bush yarns from him. Henry was in that area only for about nine months and, based on that short time and his childhood around the mid-western NSW towns of Grenfell and Gulgong (hardly Outback), for the next three decades he built an enduring reputation as an Outback writer.

During the struggles of the shearers in the early 1890s, when troopers and military with cannon and fixed bayonets were confronting thousands of workers, as at Barcaldine in Queensland where 6,000 armed men challenged the State, William Lane grew disenchanted with the prospect of social justice ever coming to this continent, and he soon rallied hundreds of people behind him and bought the 171-ft, copper hulled Royal Tar, the largest vessel built in Australia at the time.

Then, in July, 1893 he led much of the heart and soul of the Australian labour movement around Cape Horn and up the east coast of South America to Uruguay, then inland to Paraguay, to found a utopian socialist community called ‘New Australia’. The population of Australia was about one-tenth what it is today, so imagine the best known Labor leader today – let’s say a Bob Hawke or a Paul Keating – leading about 5,000 members to found a colony … on the Moon. That’s pretty much the impact New Australia had at the time, and 10,000 people attended the farewell party in Sydney’s Domain.

Mary Cameron was one of the driving forces behind the recruitment for Lane’s socialist utopia, and she stayed behind in an office at 111 Elizabeth Street working hard for the movement. Henry Lawson couldn’t raise the sixty pounds fare, but wanted to go and considered stowing away.

Working alongside Mary was a chap named Walter Head – Henry fictionalised him by name in the short story ‘The Babies in the Bush’ – who, as the New Australia project became a right mess, got embroiled in a financial scandal in the Elizabeth Street HQ and hightailed it to New Zealand under the alias Walter Ashe Woods, and soon after to Tasmania under the alias of Walter Alan Woods. ‘Walter Woods’ became one of the founders of the Tasmanian Labor Party, holding a seat in the Tasmanian House of Assembly from 1906 until 1931, becoming known as ‘the Father of the Tasmanian Parliament’ (Speaker of the House 1914-16, and 1926-28).

The Royal Tar had set sail from Sydney on July 16, 1893. The following week, the aforementioned Larry Petrie was in Brisbane making a bomb, which he exploded on the passenger steamer Aramac on July 27 – and luckily no one was killed in this act of terrorism.

Mary Cameron, who later wrote about the reaction she and Henry had to the bombing, was also involved in another Petrie bomb incident. She stood lookout at Circular Quay while Artie Rae, General Secretary of the Australian Workers' Union (AWU) and one of the first 36 Labor members elected to NSW Parliament in 1891, removed one of Larry Petrie’s bombs from a drain. With Mary and Artie was Chris Watson – later the third Prime Minister of Australia and the first Labor PM.

Petrie’s bombing wasn’t the only act of terror at the time. Immediately after the Aramac outrage The Sydney Morning Herald intoned on August 4, 1893: "… The Aramac explosion makes the eighth trouble on board ship within almost as many days.” Dynamite and matchsticks had been used widely that week. A year later, the paddle-steamer Rodney was famously burned on the Darling River by about 300 unionist shearers in protest at its being used to transport strike-breakers.

Just five or six weeks after the Rodney came the burning of the shearing shed and all the valuable sheep in it at Dagworth Station in Queensland by trade union activist Samuel ‘Frenchy’ Hoffmeister and sixteen of his comrades. Hoffmeister went into hiding after his arson, and is said to have stolen a jumbuck to survive his flight from the Queensland police. We do know that Frenchy was hunted by Dagworth’s owner, the squatter Bob McPherson and three troopers – Michael Daly, Robert Dyer, and Austin Cafferty – and died of gunshot wounds by a jolly billabong (the Queensland coroner called it “suicide”). Writing at Dagworth, Henry Lawson’s mate ‘Banjo’ Paterson immortalised the incident in a song all Australians know, with the tune provided by Squatter McPherson’s daughter, Christina, less than half a year after the event.

About two days before Dagworth was another then-famous act of industrial violence when young unionist William McLean (born c. 1870) was shot in the lung and critically injured while entering with fifty fellow union shearers the shearing shed at Grassmere Woolshed at Nettalie Station near Wilcannia, NSW. McLean’s mate Jack Murphy was also shot. When Billy McLean died of his wounds his comrades erected a large monument to him at Tower Hill Cemetery near Koroit, Victoria. Donald MacDonell, General Secretary of the AWU wrote to Henry Lawson asking him to write the epitaph and it is widely believed that the engraved words still there today are indeed Henry's work.

As the 1890s wore on with grinding poverty for most Australians, Henry Lawson was one of the very poor, making a meagre income when he could, writing for The Bulletin, Freeman’s Journal and other periodicals – his best-selling books didn’t appear till later in the decade. One of the people who bought his writings was John Norton, owner-editor of Truth, who was also a Member of the NSW Legislative Assembly for eleven years, eight months and sixteen days. (In one of his first days as a Member he was so drunk he openly used the Chamber as a chamberpot, but such was NSW Parliament in those days he was not reprimanded for it.) Norton had almost certainly murdered his flatmate in his early days in Sydney, and he was also tried for sedition. When he wasn’t in drunk tanks and mental asylums, or leading such fine community events as a march of 60,000 Australians hell-bent on throwing all Chinese out of Australia, or the Republican Riot of June 10, 1887 at Sydney Town Hall, John Napoleon Norton was making himself fabulously wealthy with his gutter rag.

Back to affairs of the heart. As we have said, Mary Cameron didn’t end up with Henry Lawson. She joined the other utopians in Paraguay, engaged to Dave Stevenson, said to be a second cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson (who lived for months just two hundred metres or so from the Lawsons’ Phillip Street home). Mary and Dave, however, didn’t tie the knot, and Mary wrote to Henry strongly hinting that he should be reunited with her in New Australia.

This, however, was not to be. Henry had already married Bertha Bredt by the time Mary’s letter arrived. Bertha was the daughter of Bertha Bredt, Senior, and step-daughter of William McNamara, who owned the radical McNamara’s Book Depot at 221 Castlereagh Street, Sydney. Next door to McNamara’s was the meeting place called Leigh House, the scene of much radical activity in the 1890s. Here the Lawsons would have heard the brilliant oratory of William Holman, later Premier of NSW (Holman’s younger brother sailed to New Australia). A young radical activist named Jack Lang, later twice Premier of NSW, married young Bertha’s sister, so he and Henry were brothers-in-law.

Henry advised friends that if they needed a feed, they should just visit McNamara’s and mention the Chicago Anarchists (the ‘Haymarket Martyrs’) to his mother-in-law. Bill McNamara was a defendant in the Sydney Anarchy Trial of February, 1894, on charges of selling an edition of the anarchist journal Hard Cash "that contained a libel of the trustees of the Savings Bank of New South Wales". . (Attorney-General and later first Prime Minister of Australia Edmund Barton tried to have him charged with sedition but could only make libel stick.) Justice Foster sentenced McNamara to six months in Parramatta Gaol and Sam Rosa, another early labour movement identity, to three months.

Also next door to McNamara’s was the Active Service Brigade, one of several anarchist urban barracks for thousands of unemployed men run by John Dwyer and Arthur Desmond. Desmond (who today is revered internationally by a large number of young Goths for his Nietzchean, anti-Semitic writings) was responsible for two journals that circulated in Sydney at the time, Justice, and Hard Cash. The latter was printed in various residences around Sydney, hidden from the police, and was even printed at a secret press located in a cave in West's Bush at Paddington. Jack Lang wrote that he helped Desmond print Hard Cash in the front room of a cottage in Darlington. For a brief time Desmond was an influence on Henry’s poetry (for example, 'A Leader of the Future', published in Worker, 1893). Another Desmond-inspired anarchist journal was The New Order, which was established by William Morris Hughes, among others. Hughes went on to become the seventh Prime Minister of Australia.

The 1891 Sand’s Directory of Sydney shows that the rent on the buildings that housed these radical rooms, Leigh House, the Active Service Brigade HQ and McNamara's Book Depot, was paid by none other than John Haynes, co-founder of The Bulletin, and Member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly for almost 30 years from May, 1887, to February, 1917.

They sure never told us that in History at school.

Henry Lawson’s biographers, such as Denton Prout and Colin Roderick, all know that Henry and Bertha were in England from mid-1900 to mid-1902. It is also known that while living in and near London, Henry’s wife Bertha had some kind of severe mental illness that first saw her admitted in September 1900 to a general hospital, and then, after she escaped and tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames, an admission to Bethlem (Bedlam) mental hospital (May 14, 1901). It is commonly asked by scholars what happened in London to precipitate the craziness that entered both their lives around now, which marked not only Bertha’s madness but also, at the height of 33-year-old Lawson’s fame, the end of his literary powers and his rapid decline into two decades of alcoholism and destitution:

"What sort of experience did he have in London that Mary Gilmore … 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

Perhaps we now have another part of the jigsaw puzzle, thanks to the UK Census of 1901.

It is already known that Mary Gilmore (Miss Cameron married William Gilmore in New Australia on May 29, 1897) and her husband, fed up with the Paraguay debacle, returned to Australia the long way, via London, staying briefly with the Lawsons in Paradise Lane, and that the Gilmores felt that Bertha was mad and perhaps wicked, while Henry was blameless. However, in Australia at the time there were rumours that Henry was acting reprehensibly in some way – rumours that were denied in a letter from England to The Bulletin by Arthur Macquarie Mullens, who used the pen-name Arthur Maquarie, and who batched with Henry for a time in Gray’s Inn Road and later a house in the village of Charlton, while Bertha was in hospital.

Furthermore, it is known that while in London, Henry probably received a letter from Hannah Thornburn (an old flame for whom he wrote several love poems including the well-known 'To Hannah' and 'Do They Think That I Do Not Know?'), who wrote to him from Melbourne and probably told him she was terribly ill following an abortion – though it is not known to whom she was pregnant. On receipt of the letter Henry gave up the United Kingdom literary ambitions he had longed for these many years, sent his wife and two children on the steamship Karlsruhe to Australia with the Gilmores, then unbeknown to them followed a few days after in the Karlsruhe’s sister ship, SS Gera to try to be with the woman he loved. When he arrived in Melbourne he found that Hannah had died while he was at sea, a tragedy for him that he later wrote about in the poem mistakenly named by a typesetter ‘Hannah Thomburn’.

What is not known by his biographers, however, is something that could not have been known when the biographies were written, because it was not published until 2001. I came upon it in my research for my novel, thanks to the canny investigations of my London research colleague, Ms Sylvia de Vanna. The UK Census of 1901 raises some important questions in data collected from Henry's residence at Gray's Inn Road.

Lawson is found to be cohabiting with one Lizzie Humphrey of Harpenden, described as “servant”, born about 1875, making her about 25 years old to Henry’s 33. Also present in the dwelling is “Bertha Lawson, born about 1900 in New South Wales” – this is baby Bertha. There is no mention of the Lawsons’ older child, Joseph, known as Jim, who was about three when the census was taken.

With Mrs Bertha Lawson confined to a mental hospital, it is not unreasonable to assume that Henry took a servant from to London from Harpenden, where he and his family had been living when his wife started hearing voices and had to be committed. It makes sense that he would take a flat in London to be near the hospital and publishers such as Blackwood’s with whom he was dealing.

But it is also reasonable to ask, who is Lizzie Humphrey, servant from Harpenden? Might she be a paramour of Henry's? Bertha soon after release from Bethlem was claiming Henry’s "unnameable brutality" (though Mary Gilmore dismissed this as fantasy). Where was little Jim Lawson (born February 10, 1898)? Presumably with Mrs Brandt in Shepperton, who did care for the children around this time. We might ask why Henry had the baby Bertha (and a putative "servant") with him and not his toddler son; surely as a busy man of his generation he would rather have taken the boy than the baby.

Lawson probably would have been stretched to employ a full-time servant as well as having either or both of his children boarded with Mrs Brandt, so was Lizzie Humphrey really in his employ?

This is conjecture, but perhaps if Henry was having an extramarital affair, he would likely take a baby with him to London but leave with child-minder Mrs Brandt an older son who might "spill the beans" to his mother. (We know from his writings around this time that he had other lovers, or fantasised that he did, from a gypsy in Charlton, UK, to an unknown woman or women in Naples on his passage back to Australia.) The existence of this cohabitation would perhaps have been hidden from many, but could not easily have been hidden from the census takers. Moreover, the fact that the exact birth dates are not known by the census collector suggests that the information was given by some third party (Arthur Maquarie, perhaps – or possibly no one was home when the collectors visited and a neighbour was consulted), for 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 he might never even known that this information fell into the hands of History.

Be that as it may, and we might never know what happened, Henry and Bertha arrived back in Sydney separately and their marriage was effectively finished; Henry’s life and drinking went into free-fall. On December 6, 1902, less than five months after the poet’s arrival back in Australia, a fisherman found Henry Lawson injured at Fairy Bower, a small beach at Manly, a suburb of Sydney. In a failed suicide attempt, Henry had jumped off a cliff – about 80 or 90 feet, according to The Sydney Morning Herald the next day.

The next 20 years were a downward slide for Henry Lawson and for his mother. Louisa Lawson died in Callan Park Asylum on August 12, 1920, a place where both of Henry’s brothers and also his mentor, JF Archibald of The Bulletin, spent much time. In the last few years of Henry’s life his alcoholism was seemingly beyond help and he regularly begged for coins on Sydney streets and at the Circular Quay turnstiles.

While her husband’s life plummeted, Bertha’s life seemed to improve and sanity returned. Henry died on September 2, 1922 and was given a State funeral two days later. Into Lawson's grave (Waverley Cemetery, Grave No 516 C of E Division) went the ashes of Bertha Lawson on August 3, 1957. She had survived the “Pote of Australia” by three and a half decades.

Like Revolutionist Lawson and Romeo Lawson, Beggar Lawson and Suicide Lawson have been expunged from the myth, and I guess that’s why they didn’t teach me about him at school.

Perhaps we are all more comfortable with it that way.

Read more at the Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology

Pip Wilson is a writer who lives in northern New South Wales. His novel, Faces in the Street: Louisa and Henry Lawson and the Castlereagh Street Push is available at boilingbilly.com. Pip acknowledges his debt to the research of Prof. Colin Roderick, Denton Prout and in particular Dr Bob James.

Index of articles on folklore and other topics

Lawson and Co.

People, things and events directly and indirectly associated with Louisa and Henry Lawson, and the radical, feminist, artistic and ratbag scene of Australia in their time. Many names were friends and colleagues of the Lawsons; others are associated by being contemporaries and in Australia, but didn't meet them. Some items contemporaneous and just out of interest. See also The Louisa Lawson and Henry Lawson Chronology (five big pages).

Active Service Brigade • Francis Adams • Frederick Matthias Alexander • Maybanke Anderson • JA Andrews • David Mackenzie Angus • SS Aramac bombing • JF Archibald • Julian Ashton • Australasian Secular Association • Australian Socialist League • Australian Workman • Edmund Barton • Daisy Bates • Barbara Baynton • Earl Beauchamp • Randolph Bedford • Bermagui Mystery • Annie Besant • George Black • Barcroft Boake • Rolf Boldrewood • William Booth • Edwin Brady • Christopher Brennan • John Le Gay Brereton • Fred Broomfield • The Bulletin • Ada Cambridge • Raffaello Carboni • Joseph Carruthers • HH Champion • William Chidley • Circular Quay bomb plot • Circular Quay Riot, 1890, Sydney • Marcus Clarke • William Whitehouse Collins • Charles Conder • William Patrick Crick • Joseph Crouch ('Rev. Dr Oswald Keating') • Dagworth Station arson • Victor Daley • Eleanor Dark • The Dawn • Dawn Club • Dawn and Dusk Club • Anderson Dawson • Medway Day • Alfred Deakin • Dulcie Deamer • Frederick Deeming 'The Demon' • CJ Dennis • Arthur Desmond • George Dibbs • Ignatius Donnelly • John Dwyer • William Dymock • Edward Dyson • Will Dyson • Havelock Ellis • Eureka Stockade • John Farrell • Federation of Australia • Fight of the Century • Andrew Fisher • Chummy Fleming • Miles Franklin • Franz Ferdinand, Archduke • 'Freedom on the Wallaby' • Joseph Furphy/Tom Collins • Edward Garnett • Henry George • May Gibbs • Mary Gilmore • Vida Goldstein • Adam Lindsay Gordon • Percy Grainger • The Great White Fleet • Young Griffo • Hal Gye • Lesbia Harford • Lawrence Hargrave • Charles Harpur • Haymarket bombing • Haymarket Martyrs • John Haynes • Walter Head • Harry Holland • William Holman • Bland Holt • Lord Hopetoun • Livingston Hopkins ('Hop') • Houdini flies in Australia • William Morris Hughes • Lizzie Humphrey • Nelson Illingworth • Jandamarra • Helen Jerome • Clara Jones • Duke Kahanamoku ('The Big Kahuna') • Annette Kellerman • Ned Kelly (Glenrowan siege) • Ned Kelly hanged • Henry Kendall • Georgina King • Rudyard Kipling • Knights of Labor • Labor gov't: first in world • Peter Lalor • Annie Lane • Ernest Lane • William Lane • Jack Lang • Bertha Lawson • Henry Lawson • Henry Lawson's funeral • Louisa Lawson • Will Lawson • Charles Webster Leadbeater • Leigh House • Limelight Department • Norman Lindsay • Ruby Lindsay • David Low • Gresley Lukin • Mungo MacCallum • Louise Mack • Dorothea Mackellar • Mary MacKillop • William Macleod • Frank P Mahony • Tom Mann • Daniel Mannix • Katherine Mansfield • Maritime Strike of 1890 • Phil May • Orpheus Myron McAdoo • George Gordon McCrae • Frederick McCubbin • Billy McLean shooting • William 'Machine Gun' McMillan • Bertha McNamara (née Bertha Bredt) • WHT McNamara • Richard Denis Meagher • Nellie Melba • Melbourne Anarchist Club • Emma Miller • David Scott Mitchell • Dora Montefiore • Captain Moonlite • Breaker Morant • Jack Moses/Dog on Tuckerbox • Tom Mutch • New Australia and Cosme • John Norton • Bernard O'Dowd • King O'Malley • Max O'Rell • Henry Steel Olcott • Vance & Nettie Palmer • Henry Parkes • AB 'Banjo' Paterson • Larry Petrie • Marie Pitt • Rosa Praed • Thomas Price (soldier) • Katharine Susannah Prichard • Roderic Quinn • QVB opened • Arthur Rae • Republican Riot, 1887, Sydney • Henry Handel Richardson • Alban Joseph Riley • Tom Roberts • George Robertson • John Robertson • Paddlesteamer Rodney burned • Sam Rosa • Steele Rudd • Rose Scott • Shearers' Strike of 1891 • Kate Sheppard • Granny Smith • Smith's Weekly • Soldiers of the Cross • Catherine Helen Spence • WG Spence • Captain Starlight • AG Stephens • Bertram Stevens • Dave Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson • Arthur Streeton • Rev. Charles Strong • Pat Sullivan/Felix the Cat • Rose Summerfield • Surfing origins/Isabel Letham • Sydney Anarchy Trial of February, 1894 • Sydney Anarchy Trial of June, 1894 • Sydney Cricket Riot of 1879 • Sydney Ducks in San Francisco • Sydney Twelve, The • Joseph Symes • Quong Tart • Tasma (Jessie Couvreur) • Adolphus George Taylor • Florence Taylor • George Augustine Taylor • The flying Taylors • Tenterfield Oration • Hannah Thornburn • Thunderbolt • Ben Tillett • WH Traill • PL Travers • Tree of Knowledge • Sydney Truth • Ethel Turner • Mark Twain in Australia • 'Up the Country' poetic contest • Thomas Walker • Waltzing Matilda • Chris Watson • Beatrice Webb • Sidney Webb • Robert Bradford Williams • JC Williamson • William Nicholas Willis • Margaret Windeyer • William Windeyer • William Robert Winspear • Wobbly Tom Barker arrested • Wobblies outlawed • Womanhood Suffrage League • Women's suffrage, Australia • Women's suffrage New Zealand • Women's suffrage, South Australia • World chronology of women’s suffrage • David McKee Wright • WWI anti-conscription struggle • Alfred Yewen • Lamont Young •