Edited Extract – Into The West, Hesperian Press, 2005

By Chris Holyday ©

 

Henry Lawson’s first trip west, his first sizeable trip away from his home state, was a big factor in moulding the young Lawson into a more complete writer. For this was Lawson out in the world, away from a dominating mother’s influence and his bohemian mates in Sydney. To the young 23 year-old the world was indeed wide – the outpost Australian colonies were strange and new, with different scenery, different opportunities and we can sense the spirit of optimism and love that he felt for his country and his people in his writing. Lawson’s often humorous, but always accurate observations of the times give us a rare glimpse of not only his frame of mind, but also the way we were, written in a style that is just as fresh and alive today. For these reasons, we will take a detailed look at Lawson’s 1890 stay in Albany, Western Australia – a trip that would be pivotal in the making of Lawson, the man and the writer.

 

When Henry Lawson and his younger brother Peter left Sydney in April 1890 he said there was talk of: “Laborers in Albany and Perth receiving 14s. a day; and were so independent that it was impossible to get a man to carry your luggage from the wharf.” This is how Lawson reported why he came to Albany (Observer, 24 May 1890). Those Albany days were relatively tumultuous as the town was experiencing a boom following completion of the railway line from Perth. House-painting (Lawson’s ‘day job’) was in demand. He painted by day and at night wrote articles for the Albany Observer for a penny a line. Boasting a modest population of only around 2500 people at the time, Albany would not keep a hold over the young writer for long – no doubt his mother hoped it would, apparently sending him there to distance him from a romantic involvement with an older married woman who was a boarder in the Lawson home and more than likely in the hope that plenty of manual work would keep him off the demon drink. He wrote letters back home to his lady acquaintance, however his mother, Louisa, intercepted them. He would later come to call his mother “The Chieftainess!”

 

Henry and Peter tramped up York Street in that winter of 1890 to take lodgings for five months at “Victoria House,” a boarding house next to the Albany Town Hall. In his writing, he pleaded for educational opportunities to be equally spread throughout the country, especially for libraries and technical education. It is ironic that his boarding house, now demolished, stood almost exactly where the Albany Town Library and Administration Offices now stand.

 

Dennis Greeve[1] of Albany says Henry obtained work with Josiah Norman whose building yard was behind the Town Hall. Dennis was told this by Josiah’s son, Tommy in the 1940s when Dennis was commencing his apprenticeship and met Josiah Norman’s retired sons. All he remembers about their views of Lawson was that, as a carpenter he was “rough as guts.” The Norman sons were in their early ‘70s when Dennis met them in the 1940s, but they still vividly remembered their early working lives with Henry Lawson. Their other comment was that he couldn’t cut a piece of wood straight as he was “half-pissed” most of the time.

 

He fared better at writing, and it was appropriate that Lawson wrote for a paper named the ‘Observer’ during his short time in Albany. For Lawson was a master of keen observation. His hearing impediment was overly-compensated by his heightened senses of penetrating vision and a perceptive mind. For the first time, Australia had one of its own native-born and bred, writing about our own country using our own vital language.

In many ways, Henry Lawson could be called the Mark Twain of Australian literature. There are striking similarities between Twain and Lawson – both coming from poor rural families, both leaving their homes at an early age and trying other jobs leading to journalism, both heading west to find the ‘real’ people in the territories of their respective nations, both using their keenly ironic humour to attack sham and pretence, both possessing a sharp eye for the ‘human condition,’ both displaying a hatred of violence and oppression towards the underdog, both questioning the status quo and both telling fresh stories cleverly garnered through eyes that would showcase a new realist approach to ‘locally-coloured’ literature in their countries. It is also significant that both their respective nations would champion their writing in their own lifetimes.

 

Lawson’s writing of the bush backblocks and the city blocks would tend towards the melancholic. Yet, he had the gift to see things how they were, without pretence. Unlike many writers of his day, he had no need to look beyond our own shores for his inspiration. Lawson despised all form of academic correctness – he said that he wrote as his heart directed him, and not how his educated critics expected him to write. His strong sense of literary realism, an eye for detail and a righteousness that led him to socialism, made him a powerful allay of the emerging worker and union movement in the period before WW1. Tragically, he would never achieve Twain’s wide popularity on the world stage working in what he perceived as the literary desert of Australia where he was barely able to make a living and battling his own demons. He relied on his house painting more than his writing.

 

In 1890, it is likely that he felt the conservative and restrictive Albany scene all too closely, and anecdotal evidence indicates that his views, as expressed in the Observer, were not well received by the old Albany leading families. Lawson’s own comment confirms this: “Local opinion seemed set against any inflow of original ideas.”

Lack of work would drive him away to the far-flung Australian colonies of the time - Western Australia, Queensland, outback New South Wales and even New Zealand. Finally, he would try his luck in London. His travels revealed a restless, gypsy like wanderlust. Lawson romantically viewed this as an inherited trait, but in reality it was fuelled by his drink-induced failings and a need to ‘clear out’ and make a fresh start.

 

A New Chum Friend

 

The frank “loneliness” comments by Lawson during his time in Albany give us a direct insight into his situation – a young man a long way from home seeking out like-minded literary types – a type he found in Lancelot Lindley-Cowen, the “lonely yankee editor” as Lawson referred to him in his “Golden Nineties” sketch which covered his Albany period. Anecdotal evidence suggests that he did not make “new-chum” friends easily during his Albany stay. He was brooding, ardent, restless and scathing of the rich:

 

Long the rich have been protected

By the walls that can’t endure

By the walls that they erected

To divide them from the poor[2]

 

We know he could not find regular work in Sydney just prior to coming to Albany:

 

I tramped the streets and looked for work

And begged for work in vain

Until I recked not, tho’ I ne’er

Might touch my tools again

I tramp’d the streets despairing

My cheeks grew white and thin

I felt the pavement wearing thro’

The leather, sock and skin[3]

 

Lawson would say of himself, “I was always restless and a rover and used to think for years that the roving star was my lucky star.”[4] But now his restless sojourn in Albany was coming to an end. In September he would travel out into the Albany hinterland and experience the “desolate waste of bush.” Bertha Lawson later confirmed that Henry and Peter travelled out into the West Australian bush in 1890. Henry later wrote a story about staying in a lonely hut one stormy night in The Ghostly Door. Bertha Lawson said this story was based on his Albany experience. As Bertha said: “From the simplest episodes in life he made real stories.” [5] He most likely travelled inland on the newly opened train line, as he mentions names like Marbleup, Kendinup, and Chokerup.

 

Now, just one week before his final post for the Observer, a sketch appeared which was in keeping with Lawson’s stated views published in the paper over those winter months. The story, The Dentist And The Chinkee, by ‘Olio’ is reproduced here in edited form. It is more heavily “worked” than a Lawson sketch (especially the humorous but long-winded opening paragraph); more reminiscent of the American Bret Harte’s tall tales – a stated favourite of Lawson who would have warmed to the story penned by ‘Olio.’ But it has the Lawson ‘ring’ to it and it is my theory that he may have collaborated on the following story with his ‘new chum friend’ from the Observer staff, who also wrote a regular column under the pseudonym ‘Olio’ (literally “a miscellaneous collection of items“). It is most likely that ‘Olio’ was his “new chum friend” as undoubtedly this was the pseudonym adopted by the Observer’s American editor, Lindley-Cowen, because much of his regular column was taken up by stories from America.

 

Yet it is instructive in both conveying attitudes prevalent at the time in the Australian colonies and showcasing local writing based on the Bret Harte/Mark Twain mould.

This sketch carries racist overtones. The anti-Chinese feelings of the times are confirmed by the inclusion of a Ben Strange cartoon from 1898 at the end of this sketch.

Lawson wrote similar pieces, such as His Mistake, while working for the Brisbane Boomerang the following year. This style of journalism was actively pursued by Lawson in Brisbane, much like Mark Twain in his old Virginia City days in America. Perhaps Lawson had already started this topical development in his writing in Albany in 1890.

 

The Dentist and the Chinkee (or) How Ting Ling Paid For His Grinders

 

The Chinaman remains to be dealt with. Whether he is the going man; the descendant of a people who once ruled the old world and were crowded into the east by the spread of European civilization, we do not know; whether he is the coming man, time alone can tell.

 

Henry Lawson, Albany, 1890

 

It was a far northern hamlet built up chiefly of weather-boards and fleas and sardine tins and pickle bottles that had outlived their usefulness and now serve only as an attraction to the migratory William goat and harem who prowl about by day and gorge on the remains of the last circus poster and lay down at night on the boundary between the townsite and the vast plains wherein the emu hops and swallows nails, and the dingo yelps and flees before the strange apparition of a human being. It was to this haven of rest they came and settled down to copper-fastened beefsteaks and butter that will make hairs grow on the palm of your hand, and hen fruit that got addled when the Ark shipped a sea and stood on her beam ends, and bread with green patches on it and the hired girl who gives you sass and tells you to git up and dust and go out into the wide world and start a home of your own if you object to a map of Asia in last year’s gravy on the tablecloth and having cold mutton broth spilt down the nape of your neck. And they stuck out a gold and black shingle that said they were dentists and sat down and waited till the customers came. But the man from way-back don’t take much stock in new fangled notions like dentists and railways and washing-machines and typewriters and scripture reading – and when he has a toothache he goes and borrows a cold chisel and a maul, and he sets the edge of the tool against the offending molar, and the old woman comes down on it with the maul – and he swallows the tooth and the chisel and the maul and the old woman if she ain’t pretty spry in getting out of the way, and he goes to work again hunting kangaroos and possums, and walking around and blaspheming generally as if nothing had happened.

 

The squeegee-eyed slavey called and had her dental vacancies filled up, and the ostler dropped in and had a few vacancies created, but still business could not be said to be booming and the black and gold shingle appealed in vain. But by-‘n-by a Chinaman called Ting Ling who had been fossicking on a worked-out claim ambled along and was attracted by the shingle and flopped in without ceremony. “How fashion?” he asked and they told him and the guileless Ting Ling reclined in the operating chair and pointed to a decayed molar that looked like the crater of an extinct volcano. “You catchee one peecee puttee outside. Too muchee bobbly; catchee chop chop,” and one held his head and one caught hold of the mortal ruins of the molar with the forceps and hauled and the Chinaman remained and the tooth knew the parental jaw no longer. And as Ting Ling didn’t seem to mind, and they liked it, they grabbed him again, and another, and another, and yet another grinder parted forever from future contact with the chopsticks. And they pulled out six before they let up and Ting Ling ran his tongue around his mouth and thought something was missing, and felt as though the back of his head was going to fall through the front if he didn’t take a half-hitch round the fence-post with his pigtail – “How fashion! No can bitee – too much pullern!” And then they explained to him that he had only undergone a humanizing and civilizing operation, and that in a few days they would put the teeth back for him.

 

And Ting ling smiled a smile of full beneficence and love for his Caucasian brother and bowed his way out. He returned a few days later and had his long-lost molars returned to him affixed to a plate and flopped into his mouth, and he felt like a regenerated image of Buddha and again smiled and blessed the day that he had lit up on fossicking and had strolled into the far-north township of the ambulatory cockroach. And they all looked pleased and happy and the sun seemed to shine brighter than ever ……… until Ting Ling started dancing like a crucified spider and blaspheming in all the languages and seventeen different dialects that prevail with various odors and essences from Canton to Cheefoo.

 

And this all had been caused, and the long-to-be-remembered sadness induced by their having presented Ting Ling with a small memo of their affections and undying regard in the shape of an account for 20 pounds for services rendered. And they had to rope him and unitedly sit on his chest and inject gas into him and threaten to pull all his teeth out

And when he had sobered down sufficiently they asked him what he was going to do about it, and he said in the language we all understand; “How fashion? Me no can pay – hab got tlee schilling tlixpence, no more. You chargee like hellee – too muchee.” And they looked at him scrufully; and by-‘n-by the junior was seen to turn away his head and weep at the black ingratitude of the heathen, and they held a consultation and wondered whether they could bury him out in the back yard or whether they had to boil him down to grease or inject him with gas and send him up as a balloon, but this last suggestion was laid on one side as involving a further outlay of capital and labour upon an utterly worthless subject. Then Ting Ling said: “Hi yah! Me shabbee how fashion you can catchee your money. Me play you poker.” They regarded him with amazement and wild eyed terror for a moment, and then with distrust, and finally they decided to settle down to a little game of draw with the Chinkee …. And they thought they’d open a little skin game without limits or restrictions of any sort that are vexatious to the spirit and significant only of vacillating temperaments. They allowed they had all the capital on their side and were safe, and were only playing to get Ting Ling’s “tlee schilling tlickspence” and his new-found teeth.

 

They decided to take Ting Ling single-handed at a game in which they reckoned they were pretty pure and unadulterated and in which the cream always came to the top on their side and the milk curdled and yellowed on the other. Two hours was the limit fixed and the senior partner sat down first. During the two hours, Ting Ling held five straight flushes, twenty four full hands, four aces seventeen times, four kings thirty one times, and two pairs more times than we could count. When time was called, eight sovereigns had been wiped of Ting Ling’s liabilities and the senior member of the firm got up and made a remark that literally construed was decidedly uncomplimentary to the Mongolian race. The junior partner took his seat and bucked in against that descendant of Ah Sin, but with no luck. And after two more hours the junior partner rose from his seat and asked all and sundry:

 

Is it guile or a dream?

Is it Mose Lye that I doubt?

Are things what they seem?

Or are visions about?

Is our civilization a failure?

Or is the Caucasian played out?

 

But without waiting to reply to the interrogations, Ting Ling, childlike and bland, laid “flee pound fifteen schilling” on the table and said, “My tankee you belly much. Teef b’long number one chop. Next time I wanchee more come this side catchee,” and he slid out of the room with the silence of a piece of butter on a hot plate, and was lost to sight – though not to our memory dear.

--------------------------------------------

 

Cartoon speech bubbles …

Member of the Weld Club: “Serves the brutes right –

Fancy those heathens having the cheek to play for money.”

 

Member of another club: “I quite agree with you –

Why don’t they play Poker?”