Angry and dismayed

As a SLNSW Visiting Scholar, I’ve spent quite some time deep in the archives. There’s still some research to do but essentially I’ve emerged from the stacks – how shall I put this – angry.

Angry and dismayed.

It’s now clear to me that erasure and vilification shaped Louisa Lawson’s life and her subsequent legacy. In fact I’ve so many examples of her deliberate exclusion and suppression that it’s making my head spin.

Here’s a small selection (and oh my goodness, there are so many more).

• In 1875 Louisa Lawson, then 27 years old, lobbied for a government school to be built in Eurunderee, where she and her husband were then living and farming with their young family. Though she was a prime mover in the negotiations, the local men excluded her from a meeting held to discuss the subject. Louisa was forced to watch proceedings through a crack in the wall.
• In 1883, after relocating to Sydney, Louisa began a fund-raising initiative to refurbish the grave of poet Henry Kendall. She even, with her own money, bought the gravesite next to Kendall’s, so a suitably large monument could be erected. The project caught the imagination of the society ladies of Sydney; the project snowballed; and various committees were formed – none of which working-class Louisa was invited to join. In the end a decision was made to erect the memorial elsewhere; no-one mentioned it to Louisa; and she was left with the empty plot. There’s evidence to suggest that Louisa didn’t even attend the unveiling of the grand new monument.
• In 1888 Louisa established The Dawn – one of Australia’s first journals for women and an immediate commercial success. It was also the only Australian journal (ever) to be printed entirely by women. By 1889 Lawson employed ten printers however the relevant union tried to force Lawson to dismiss her all-female staff, appealed to advertisers and newsagents to boycott The Dawn and harassed the women at their work.
• As early as 1896, when Henry Lawson’s star was rising, a feature article in The Bulletin – which was about Louisa – was headlined ‘The Poet’s Mother’. Louisa herself lamented it. In the archives I’ve found her letter to the Bulletin’s literary editor, thanking him for the article but in which she hopes to one day be described as more than ‘the mother of man’. Even today, the latest online edition of the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (2005) literally opens its piece on Louisa Lawson with the phrase: ‘Henry Lawson’s mother’.

Letter from Louisa Lawson to A.G. Stephens, 1896
I have not thanked you for the nice notice you gave me in [The] Bulletin but someday I hope to be strong enough to look the public in the face as Louisa Lawson, not as the mother of a man. A man writes me up, a man takes my photo and I appear as the mother of a man!!

• A few years after being described ‘as the poet’s mother’ Lawson was ripped off by the Post-Master General (PMG), after she designed and patented a buckle for securing mailbags. The Post Office used the buckle for several years until Lawson’s contract was nefariously handed to the PMG’s ‘mate’. The courts eventually found in Lawson’s favour, but she was never properly recompensed. The PMG, in retaliation, subsequently deregistered Louisa’s journal, The Dawn, as a newspaper, meaning Lawson couldn’t take advantage of reduced postage rates to her subscribers. The journal ceased publication within 18 months.

• And finally, the venomous attitude of Henry’s (male) biographers towards Louisa Lawson is ubiquitous. They consistently hold Louisa responsible for her adult son Henry’s alcoholism and his failure to capitalise on his early literary promise. While her often absent husband receives no condemnation, Louisa is variously described as bitter, unloving, impatient, impetuous, unfriendly, and intemperate. One goes so far as to say she ‘had the sort of face you could break a brick against.’ My favourite slur is that she was ‘untidy’ and ‘scamped the housework’. One of Henry’s biographers even condescends to say that in more favourable circumstances Louisa ‘could have been a successful businesswoman’. Because apparently seventeen years of running a profitable journal and print shop doesn’t count?

Under such oppression, Lawson’s ability and desire to continue to speak up and advocate for other women – largely through her journal The Dawn, which she herself described as a ‘mouthpiece’ – is remarkable, verging on heroic.

Was Louisa Lawson a perfect person? Of course not. But who amongst us is?

I’m hoping my forthcoming biography of Lawson will provide some compelling insights into a fascinating, flawed person. Henry described his mother, in 1917, as ‘a selfish, indolent, mad-tempered woman’. Her other children, and her grandchildren, remembered her with great pride and affection.

As in many things, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.