Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson, the son of a Norwegian miner and a women’s rights activist, was born in the rural Grenfell goldfields of Australia in 1867. His mother edited a women’s newspaper called The Dawn in addition to publishing poetry and fiction of her own. Lawson attended school as a boy but went deaf by age fourteen and, despite being an avid reader, failed his university entrance exams. He joined his mother in Sydney at age sixteen to continue studying and published his first poem, “A Song of the Republic,” in The Bulletin at age twenty. He wrote for various newspapers beginning in 1890, and in 1892, The Bulletin paid for him to take a trip into the outback, where he witnessed the harsh reality of life in rural Australia firsthand. In 1896, at age twenty-nine, Lawson married Bertha Bredt, Jr.; she filed for divorce in 1903, however, citing physical abuse. By the time of their divorce, Lawson had established a reputation as one of the foremost Australian writers of his day. Nevertheless, he was both poor and an alcoholic, and was jailed for not paying child support. After his divorce he moved into a boardinghouse run by an older woman, Isabel Byers, who became his patron and a fierce advocate of his work for the remainder of his life. Lawson died in 1922 of a cerebral hemorrhage, and was honored with a New South Wales state funeral upon his death.