17 June 1867: Henry Lawson is born

Henry Lawson was born on 17 June 1867 in a tent in Grenfell, on the New South Wales goldfields. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia’s “greatest short story writer“. His short stories and ballad-like verse are noted for his realistic portrayals of bush life.

He was the son of Niels Hertzberg Larsen, a Norwegian-born miner, and his wife Louisa who was 16 years younger than her husband. On Henry’s birth, the family surname was Anglicised and Niels became Peter Lawson. The newly married couple were to have an unhappy marriage. Louisa, after family-raising, took a significant part in women’s movements and edited a women’s paper.

Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson had a difficult childhood, moving around with his family while his father pursued gold, and helping his mother run the family selection in his father’s absence. Shy and partially deaf, Lawson had only three years of formal education and yet, encouraged by his mother, with whom he moved to Sydney following the end of his parent’s marriage, he began writing poetry and short stories.

A vocal nationalist and republican, Lawson regularly contributed to The Bulletin, which published his first poem, A Song of the Republic. In the following years, Henry Lawson’s literary reputation grew as he contributed to several Australian magazines and newspapers, and had works published, many of which helped popularise the Australian vernacular in fiction. He wrote prolifically into the 1890s.

In 1896, Lawson married Bertha Bredt, Jr, daughter of Bertha Bredt, the prominent socialist. The marriage ended unhappily when Bertha filed for divorce in 1903 citing Lawson’s habitual drunkenness and cruelty, attesting that he had subjected her to physical violence, and emotional and psychological abuse. They had two children, a son Jim (Joseph) and a daughter Bertha. After this time his writing output declined, in part due to struggles with alcoholism and mental illness. At times destitute, he spent periods in Darlinghurst Gaol and psychiatric institutions.

After he died in September 1922 following a stroke at just 55 years old, Henry Lawson became the first Australian writer to be granted a state funeral.