by Paul Terry
Lawson had stayed at Leeton for twenty months, and at first it seemed the move might have been his salvation. He made friends and wrote several works, including A Letter From Leeton, which was published as a book and sent to the soldiers in France. He and Mrs Byers made their home in a four-roomed weatherboard cottage, surrounded by fruit trees and grapevines. Mrs Byers—whom Henry called ‘the Little Landlady’—fussed around, keeping the home spic and span, and doing her best to keep Henry out of trouble. Lawson’s moustachioed, slouch-hatted figure was a regular sight as he walked along the dusty streets with his loyal little dog Charley following close behind. His mate and fellow poet Jim Gordon lived nearby and often accompanied Henry and Charley on their perambulations around town.
Eccentric as ever, Henry was frequently heard to burst into song as he strolled along the banks of the Murrumbidgee River. The locals soon became accustomed to this strange sight and sound, and when Isabelle Ramsay, a reporter from Sydney’s Sunday Times, visited in June, she found a happy Henry Lawson who was greeted with nods and smiles from the town’s grownups and squeals of delight from the children. Ramsay had first met Lawson during the dark days when he stalked Sydney’s Angus & Robertson bookshop, pestering publishers and book buyers for a handout. The reporter remembered a ghostly and haggard figure from those days, but found the new Henry to be sun-bronzed and healthy:
Living in such an earthly Paradise, and with his mind relieved of all financial worries, he is drinking in renewed vitality for his body and fresh inspiration for his mind with every breath. Jim Gordon says that he is better in health and writing better than ever he did in his life—and surely a man’s mate ought to know! It is good to remember the tragic-eyed man of a few years ago and contrast him with the sun-tanned being who is living in the sunshine down there, surrounded by his old friend, his mate and his dog.
But while Henry may well have been ‘drinking in vitality’, he had not stopped drinking alcohol either. Although Leeton was supposed to be dry, sly grog was available and there was little to stop Lawson from travelling to the neighbouring ‘wet’ towns of Whitton and Narrandera. There he could drink as much as he liked. And sometimes he did. His stay in the Riverina was productive, but even prohibition could not keep him sober and when he and Mrs Byers returned to Sydney in 1917, he was no better than he had been when he left.
He struggled on over the next few years, partly thanks to a pension of £1 a week from the government. In June 1920, he was back in hospital being treated for alcoholism or depression, or both. Syndicated newspaper reports updated the nation on Lawson’s steadily fading health. One reporter recalled that Henry had been sent to Leeton to recover but ‘the bush either kills or cures a poet. Henry Lawson did not stay long enough to make certain the experiment’.
In August that year, Henry suffered another blow when his mother, Louisa, died after a long illness. Louisa would have been pleased that her brief obituaries in the papers mentioned that she had been a pioneer of women’s rights and a publisher of merit. She might have been equally disappointed that the same reports introduced her ‘as Henry Lawson’s mother’.
Henry spent much of 1921 in hospital, where he received dozens of letters from dignitaries and fans. But it was the letters sent by schoolchildren that he most cherished and he was moved to write a short piece for the papers praising the teachers who guided the young letter writers:
They are the bravest body of people in the world—as brave as any of the early pioneers in any land; for whereas the worst that could happen to these was death at the hands of savages, many of our teachers have to suffer temperamentally many years of the worst kind of mental and heart-torture, and keep their pens still and tongues silent about it. I have never been a very good or a very brave man, but I stand bare-headed to these people now.
In December, the federal government increased Lawson’s pension to £3 a week. He returned to his room at Mrs Byers’ home in Sydney early in 1922 and for a while he seemed to be recovering. He was seen at his usual haunts, and in June he celebrated his fifty-fifth, and final, birthday. On the evening of Friday 1 September he suffered a seizure and retired to bed. His condition worsened through the night and, at half-past ten the next morning, Henry Lawson died of a cerebral haemorrhage. His brilliant, tortured life had come to an end and people across Australia mourned his passing.
Leading the mourners was Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who announced a state funeral would be held on the following Monday. Henry Lawson, said Hughes, was Australia’s greatest minstrel. ‘He loved Australia and his verse sets out its charm, its vicissitudes,’ Hughes said. ‘None was his master. He was the poet of Australia, the minstrel of the people.’ Echoing these sentiments, New South Wales Premier Sir George Fuller announced Henry would be granted a state funeral.
On Monday morning 4 September, Lawson’s body lay in state at the city morgue and mourners filed past his open casket to pay their respects. That afternoon, the casket was closed and taken to St Andrew’s Cathedral, where it lay covered in native roses, gum leaves and a spray of wattle. Every seat in the cathedral was taken as people gathered for a short but stirring funeral service. The cathedral organist played Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ and ‘The Rock of Ages’. As the last notes died away, the church fell silent except for the muffled sobs of those overcome by grief.
When the service was over, so many people crowded busy George Street that trams and cars had to be stopped. Thousands of people, many of them schoolchildren with their hats doffed, lined the streets of Paddington as the hearse made its way through the busy city towards Waverley cemetery. A police band marching to the beat of muffled drums followed the hearse to the cemetery, where Lawson was interred in a grave containing the body of Henry Kendall, another great Australian poet who, like Lawson, had been plagued by poverty, mental illness and heavy drinking.
Henry’s estranged wife Bertha and their two children were among the mourners at the burial. Also there were politicians and gentlemen who rubbed shoulders with unionists and working men. Henry’s literary colleagues and representatives of newspapers from Sydney and Melbourne paid their respects, as did dozens of schoolchildren and their teachers. Barty Paterson did not attend, but he was moved by the death of his fellow poet and later fondly remembered him as having ‘the insight of a seer and the mind of a child’.
In a radio talk he gave about nine years after Henry’s death, Paterson recalled Lawson’s epic battles with publishers over money. Inevitably caused by Lawson’s irresponsible attitude to his own financial affairs, these scraps often played out at Sydney’s Angus & Robertson bookshop. Lawson would announce, ‘I’m just going down to shake up those cows for a few quid,’ and his gaunt, threadbare apparition so upset the clientele at the shop that the manager decided Henry should be paid a fee to go away. Paterson finished his broadcast with a whimsical reflection on the childlike man who nevertheless made such an impression on his country that, in 1931, a statue was erected in his honour in Sydney’s The Domain:
Whenever I see the statue . . . I sometimes reflect on how little the public will do for a literary man in his lifetime, and what a lot they will do for him when he is dead. Henry’s tactics may not have been without reproach, but he faced his troubles in the only way open to him, and, as he says in his verses:
You have to face ’em
when your pants begin to go.
*
When Lawson died, Paterson was fifty-eight, his formerly dark hair and moustache shot through with silver, but he remained fit and active. As always, racing was a passion and he was a regular sight at Randwick where his reserved and dignified demeanour made him stand out among the track’s more colourful identities. Although he kept a low profile, his name continued to crop up in social jottings. In October 1922, papers in Sydney and Melbourne noted that Barty and Alice attended a luncheon hosted by Dame Margaret Davidson at Randwick, while four years later he was pictured discussing the races with golfer and racehorse owner Una Clift at Victoria Pa
rk. As always, Paterson was neatly dressed in coat, tie and hat.
Everyone knew him at the track, but he usually kept to himself. A racing reporter with the pen-name of ‘Cestus’ later remembered that Paterson could often be seen sitting close to the rails, watching the horses thunder around the track through a pair of field glasses. When the race finished, Paterson would put the glasses away, look around and leisurely depart. Although he seldom spoke, he could occasionally be seen chatting quietly with trainers or owners. In a sport that attracts its fair share of rogues, Paterson’s undoubted integrity and vast knowledge made him a sought-after and trusted commentator on the racing game.
As a journalist, he was not afraid to tackle the sport’s unsavoury side. He summed it up neatly in the Sportsman on 24 October 1924 when he asked whether big punters were a help or hindrance to honest racing, and observed a truism: ‘Whenever it comes to a struggle between a man’s honesty and gigantic financial inducements, the average race goer will always harbour a suspicion that the money may have influenced the result.’ Although he had been to more race meetings than most, nobody ever doubted that he took the same sober honesty to his racing passion that he did to his everyday life.
In 1930, Paterson resigned from The Sydney Sportsman but continued to freelance as a sports journalist for the racy Smith’s Weekly. His children, Grace and Hugh, were now aged twenty-six and twenty-four. In the coming years, Barty would become a proud and hands-on grandfather, but before that there would be more books, a career change to the new-fangled broadcasting industry and more travels. As his life entered its final stages he would experience yet more world-shaking events. Ahead lay the Great Depression and another world war—even more terrible than the first.
17
THE WRITER REFLECTS
Tuesday 29 October 1929 became infamous as ‘Black Tuesday’. When Wall Street stocks collapsed in a few devastating hours, the world was set on a course of hardship that would only end after the deaths of more than 60 million people in World War II. Whether Black Tuesday was the cause of the hardship—to be known as the Great Depression—or a symptom of it meant little to the millions of people around the world who had a decade of grinding poverty forced upon them. Australia, with its high dependence on agricultural exports, was among the hardest hit. Unemployment rose to a massive 30 per cent, families went hungry and the big cities were depopulated as a new wave of swagmen—many of them former soldiers traumatised by the war—took to country roads, desperate for work or a handout.
It was a time of political unrest. The federal Labor government led by James Scullin had come to power just a week before Black Tuesday and inherited an economy in crisis. In October 1930, as unemployment soared, the fiery Jack Lang was elected to his second term as New South Wales premier and pursued his own plan to deal with the economy, in defiance of the prime minister’s ideas. A year later, as a bitter dispute between the state and commonwealth worsened, Lang’s supporters in the House of Representatives brought down the Scullin government. Labor was bitterly divided and the new prime minister, the United Australia Party’s Joseph Lyons, led a government presiding over an economy in a tailspin.
At the same time, far right activists gained massive ground, especially in the big cities. The fascist New Guard movement was formed in Sydney in February 1931 and soon grew to have some 50,000 members in New South Wales, mostly in the capital. Fanatically anti-communist, the New Guard was led by war veteran Colonel Eric Campbell and its members were given quasi-military ranks. The New Guard was bitterly opposed to Lang’s New South Wales Labor and its increasingly thuggish efforts to depose him led to street fighting in Sydney and even a wild plot to kidnap Lang and place New South Wales under martial law.
But the New Guard’s most infamous moment came on Saturday 19 March 1932, when it dramatically upstaged Lang at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. New Guard member Colonel Francis de Groot, dressed in military uniform, gathered with mounted soldiers stationed on the bridge and, when Lang went to ceremonially cut the ribbon, De Groot charged forward and dramatically slashed the ribbon with a sword. De Groot announced the bridge was now open ‘in the name of the decent and respectable people of New South Wales’. De Groot was pulled from his horse and taken to a lunatic asylum. He was later declared to be sane and fined £5 plus £4 costs on a charge of offensive behaviour in a public place.
Meanwhile, the ribbon was hastily retied and cut again by Lang who belatedly declared the bridge open. It was not the end of the conflict, however. On the night of 13 May, as Lang’s government descended further into turmoil, New Guard officers gathered in the basement of a store in Sydney, ready to march on parliament and overthrow the government if Lang did not resign by seven o’clock. It was a potentially violent political flashpoint, but, when the Governor, Sir Philip Game, sacked Lang at six o’clock, the crisis was over. It was the beginning of the end for the New Guard, which although it survived for a few more years, never again reached the stage where it could threaten to overthrow an Australian government.
Nonetheless, the radical New Guard and its muscular rightist agenda had struck a deep chord with many, especially former military men and, supposedly, a significant number of police officers. Among those said to sympathise with the New Guard was Barty Paterson, who was perhaps unfairly tarred by association, thanks to a brief mention of him by the New Guard leader, Eric Campbell, in 1965. In his book recalling the New Guard’s glory days, The Rallying Point, Campbell wrote that Paterson called to see him one morning:
I was delighted to make his acquaintance and to listen to his shrewd summing up of the situation. His trim, well-dressed figure and his alert crisp manner was quite unlike what I imagined any poet would be . . .
Although he would have shared the New Guard’s nationalism and abhorrence of communism, Paterson would have disapproved of its penchant for violence and, as an establishment man, it is hard to see him supporting the violent overthrow of elected governments, regardless of their incompetence or otherwise. It seems far more likely that if he did meet Eric Campbell their association went no further.
Besides, Paterson had enough to keep him busy in his personal and professional life without meddling in politics. In December 1931, he proudly ‘gave away’ his daughter Grace at her wedding to naval officer, Lieutenant Kenneth Harvie. The ceremony was held in the grounds of Yaralla. Noting that a garden wedding was unusual in Sydney, the gossip columnists reported that Grace wore a classical frock of ivory satin and that the ‘aisle’ was created by rails of twisted asparagus ferns lining a path that led to a floral altar. The wedding made the society pages from north Queensland to South Australia. In Adelaide, the Mail reported on 19 December that a garden was the perfect setting for the wedding of a poet’s daughter:
The initials of the bride and the groom were outlined in flowers over the door. Although the wedding was the simplest that could be imagined a lavish appearance was gained by the gold braid and gilt buttons of officers of the navy who were present. Rugs were thrown on the lawns, on which the guests sat, fanning themselves with a dignified air, for mosquitoes and flies are no respecters of even garden weddings! Dame Eadith Walker and the bride’s mother received the guests. And when they assembled inside the house for the reception it was almost as full of flowers as was the garden itself!
Paterson, meanwhile, continued to write racing notes for the papers, but also remained willing to embrace new ways of communicating with the public. Showing the same open-mindedness with which he welcomed the arrival of the motor car, he had become increasingly interested in the new wireless technology which could beam voices into lounge rooms around the country. From October 1931, he gave a series of talks on ABC radio on Wednesday nights. The cover of the October edition of Wireless Weekly that year showed a Paterson well advanced in years but looking quite at home smoking a pipe and boiling a billy on a camp fire. Although his very Australian accent put him at odds with the plummy-voiced broadcasters of the time, it was a measure of the quality
of his writing that his talks were broadcast into homes around the country.
His topics were many and varied, ranging from his experiences of war to his definitions of news and news gathering, but it was his love of the bush and of sport that created his best broadcasting. Not many people could get away with giving a radio talk entitled ‘Sheep’, but Banjo did—and he did it with customary humour and the insightfulness of a lifetime’s knowledge of the animal on whose back the nation had been built.
The talks shifted from tales of enormous Northern Territory mosquitoes that would leave ‘nothing but a skeleton’ of their victims to his views of ‘political giants’ such as Sir Henry Parkes and Sir Edmund Barton. He told of a rush for gold in Western Australia and the striking of liquid riches—bore water—in Queensland. And, as always, he found the quirky side of life in the bush. His tale of a cockatoo in Queensland that had learned to say, ‘It looks very dry, don’t it?’ undoubtedly raised chuckles in living rooms around the nation.
Sport was a recurring theme. In one talk, he remembered the feats of the great rowers he had admired as a boy; in another, he recalled being ‘crammed with facts’ about Australian cricketers in his school days and being delighted to meet some of them when he grew up. One evening, he told his listeners of meeting a ‘wiry sunburnt young bush chap’ in a Sydney sports store. With an athlete’s eye, Paterson could tell the young man was something special.
‘That’s a hard-looking young fellow and he’s very light on his feet,’ Paterson said to the store salesman. ‘I should say he had done some boxing or was accustomed to riding rough horses. They have to be pretty active for that game.’
Not quite, replied the salesman, but the young athlete was nonetheless someone quite remarkable. His name was Don Bradman, the ‘new boy wonder cricketer’. This Bradman lad, said the salesman, would become the world’s hardest wicket to get. The salesman was of course proved right and Barty Paterson could say he had met another great Australian.