Louisa Lawson’s wedding ring

Louisa Lawson’s papers are among the many treasures held by the State Library of NSW.

Her papers include letters. Annotated articles. Copies of The Dawn, the journal Lawson successfully ran for seventeen years. Photographs. Scrapbooks. Poems. Bank books. The reminiscences of her daughter, painstakingly written out over many pages in a beautiful cursive script.

When I began my research earlier this year I was certainly greedy to see all those things, to read those papers, to immerse myself in Lawson’s world.

But there was one very special thing among those papers that I was particularly keen to see: Louisa Lawson’s wedding ring.

I knew it was in there somewhere because it was tantalisingly, although somewhat prosaically, described in the library’s catalogue.

R 2188 Item 2: Metal ring contained in envelope labelled ‘Mrs Louisa Lawson’s wedding ring. Mother of Henry Lawson the poet.’ [Signed] Gertrude O’Connor

Gertrude was Louisa’s daughter and the youngest of her five children. Gertrude – the family called her Gertie – had a twin sister, Annette, who died when the girls were only nine months old. I’m not sure Louisa ever got over it and it seems Gertie forever lived in the shadow of her three talented older brothers (Henry the writer, Charles who could draw and Peter the musician).

The lovely librarians who brought the wedding ring out for me to look at were almost as excited about it as me. And they taught me a new word: realia. I can’t really explain how to pronounce it, but in kindness I feel you should know it has four syllables (re-ARL-lee-ah). Realia, borrowed from Latin and meaning the ‘real thing’, is library-speak for objects, mementos and artifacts. Realia is mainly found within the Library’s heritage collections and has been collected because of its association with people or events in NSW history.

As the librarians and I discovered, the ring is indeed contained within an envelope, and these days within a specialist archival plastic sleeve. So it was an honour to be allowed to hold it.

The ring is a very plain and narrow band, weighing almost nothing at all. Possibly gold, or maybe not – some marks on the inside of it are too worn to read and to my inexpert eye the ring seemed a little tarnished. I’ve added ‘ask a jeweller about the ring’ to my ever-increasing research To Do list.

If you’ll pardon the pun, the ring’s modesty rings true. Louisa’s much older groom (as a bride she was 18 to his 34) was a Norwegian sailor who jumped ship to take up gold prospecting. Nils Larsen (they changed the family name to Lawson when Henry was born) was not then, nor ever would be, a wealthy man.

I was very interested to note that the ring had been cut, presumably from Louisa’s finger after her death in 1920. Interested because that cut tells us that even though she was at least nominally separated from her husband in 1883, and widowed in 1888, Louisa chose to wear that ring for the rest of her life.

Social status may have played a role in that choice, of course. For a woman in Louisa’s day, marriage carried with it a substantial cachet. It’s possible that a working class country woman mixing with the privately funded middle-class women of the suffragist movement – as Louisa certainly was – needed all the social cachet she could muster.

In my forthcoming biography of Louisa Lawson, I hope to use her wedding ring as a jumping off point for discussions about her marriage, yes, but also and probably more importantly about her advocacy for women’s rights within marriage and her subsequent lobbying for changes to the Marriage Act.

More compelling though, is to wonder if she continued to wear it for sentimental reasons.

Louisa’s marriage is routinely described as difficult, but every marriage is opaque to outsiders. Even, often, to the children of the married couple and in this case Gertie’s and Henry’s recollections are the only accounts we have of Nils’ and Louisa’s relationship.

In that small, broken ring lies a much wider story.