Louisa Lawson: Primary Sources

How is it that we know anything at all about Louisa Lawson?

Like most of us, she appears briefly in the public records: her birth, marriage and death are all formally recorded. Her various Sydney addresses are listed in the White Pages of her day, the Sands Directories.

But we have no diaries – business or personal – and relatively few letters to or from Louisa’s friends and family.

Apart from Louisa’s published writing (of which, thanks to her journal The Dawn, we have a lot) almost all we have is a short autobiographical fragment, undated but probably written by Louisa in the last decade of her life (she died in 1920), when she was aged in her 60s and her mental health was in decline.

The fragment (some pages seem to be missing and it ends abruptly) consists of two dozen typewritten pages lightly edited in pen. It opens with

“I have been pressed by friends to write the story of my life and although not conscious of any useful purpose to be served by so doing, I have decided to yield to the friendly request and give a correct, if crude, life report of myself.”

Louisa’s meandering document feels very much like a working draft. It’s annotated with comments like “(Insert encounter with bushrangers)” and “Exploits with Cobb & Co, &c.” but then it seems she never got around to it.

She spends many pages detailing a childhood escapade involving a neighbour’s peaches , and just as many sketching out her parents’ backgrounds, but only a short paragraph describing her decision to marry. Her working life, as a farmer or as proprietor of The Dawn, one of Australia’s first journals for women, is hardly mentioned. Nor are her children.

Unlike a modern memoirist, she offers scant insight into her private thoughts and mind.

What we do have in abundance, though, are Louisa’s public thoughts, via her persona as an advocate, journalist, poet and author. Across the seventeen years that she wrote and published The Dawn we can trace her preoccupations and causes. There, in clear, careful prose she writes about what matters to her and explains how, in her view, her readers should make their world a better place. From Votes for Women through the choice of pictures for the wall, Louisa was vitally interested in all aspects of women’s lives. 

Another source of information about Louisa is her famous eldest son, Henry Lawson. Much of his fiction and poetry draws on his childhood and adolescence, when the Lawson family lived and farmed in difficult circumstances near Mudgee. Henry’s fans and biographers often like to assume that this material is straightforwardly autobiographical although sources like the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature are careful to point out that the apparent artlessness of his pieces is in fact “the work of a conscious craftsmen seeking the effect of naturalness.”

Henry did however leave us a genuinely autobiographical fragment – formally labelled as such and more polished than his mother’s – in which he covers at least some of the same ground as Louisa. What he chooses to include and to leave out (his brothers barely rate a mention, his sister none at all) potentially also provides some telling insights.

Most insightful of all, though, are the multi-volume recollections of Louisa’s daughter, Gertrude.

Deliberately written for posterity and now held by the Mitchell Library, Gertrude’s hundreds and hundreds of pages of recollections – all drafted in her careful cursive script – shine a fascinating light on the Lawson family.  

One volume is focussed on her mother, another is focused on Henry, and then a third – when it perhaps it became clear to her that it was difficult to write about one of them without writing about all of them – titled the Lawson Family History.

Gertrude seems to have kept working hard at her biographical endeavour; including working to improve it.

She never uses the term biographer of herself: in Gertrude’s recollections she collates material and delivers a narrative based on the facts as she knows them, in a conversational discursive style. Occasionally, and understandably in such a long narrative, she gets dates slightly wrong. More often she fails to provide dates at all.

Gertrude rarely quotes her sources, for example, beyond saying something like “As Mother said to me…” Sometimes she repeats sections of her mother’s autobiographical fragment word for word, sometimes she repeats sections of Henry’s writings, always without acknowledging where her writing ends and theirs begins. Throughout, she doesn’t seem at all committed to journalistic accuracy, and is always willing to embroider an anecdote to which she can’t possibly have been a witness with a scene setting detail or some direct speech.

In fact reading Gertrude’s recollections is very much like listening to an elderly relative discuss the past.

In some cases context makes it clear to the careful reader that her information was received at second or third hand. Henry was nearly ten years older than his sister Gertrude. So some of her narrative about Henry’s experiences at primary school, for example, could only have first been told by Henry to their mother, then – years later – by their mother to Gertrude.

Similarly for the family stories about Gertrude’s grandparents, and her grandparents’ parents – Gertrude can only have heard those stories at second or third hand. Yet she doesn’t differentiate between events where she was present, and events where she was not. Often, at least when she is talking about events during her own lifetime, it is difficult – impossible even – to tell.

Gertrude’s pages and pages of writing contains very few corrections or crossings out but it is not clear whether the existing works are a first draft, or the result of multiple iterations. Her narrative style is conversational, occasionally melodramatic, and often compelling. She’s a little prone to rambling discussions about God and the mysteries of the universe but these are clearly very meaningful to her and, besides, offer useful insights into her own patterns of thought and belief.

There are, of course, many gaps and lacunae in Gertrude’s narrative. No memoirist includes everything and Gertrude, in her meandering style, flits from one family story to the next, often without context and usually without offering the accompanying motivations or psychological insights that we now expect from modern writers. We don’t even hear what she thinks about the events she describes.

Gertrude freely admits that she lacks the “super minds” of her parents and brothers; she disparages herself and her intellectual skills. But her voice on the page is articulate, her vocabulary is wide-ranging, and she genuinely seems to be telling the truth as she knows it. Gertrude, a working-class widow in her forties, writing from her home in suburban 1920s Sydney, has clearly given her all. From a historical point of view, if not a literary one, her recollections represent a magnificent and concerted effort of many, many hours and we’re lucky to have them, preserved in the Mitchell Library. She knew, as the Famous Poet’s sister, that she was contributing to the historical record. 

Besides, without Gertrude’s recollections, we’d really only have Henry’s side of the story.

Images on this page courtesy State Library of NSW. Gertrude’s recollections have been digitised and are available to view, for free, online. The Life and Work of Louisa Lawson, for example (from which the above example is taken) is available here.