The Camaraderie of Not Caring

The legend of Henry Lawson which arose after his death was that of a man who had been there at the birth of the nation in the great days of the Bulletin, and who had partly created it himself. It was Lawson the depicter of rabble-rousing republicanism, of back-blocks camaraderie, and of mateship nationalism. The legend became part of the larger triumph of the nineties. This was the Lawson taught in schools, the legend of Lawson as success.

But we get a very different picture if we look at Lawson’s own life and writing unimpeded by later impressions. In addition we now have available his journalism, reprinted in Autobiographical and Other Writings 1887–1922, edited by Colin Roderick, which throws light on what he actually thought. Lawson was representative, but more representative of the collapses than the successes in Australian life.

His father jumped ship and went to the gold diggings. When gold petered out, he set up a small selection in the poor goldfields country in the Mudgee–Gulgong district to the north-west of Sydney. There Henry Lawson was born in a tent, and as a young boy he experienced the struggles of the small selectors as their farms and lives disintegrated. His parents eventually separated, and Lawson and his mother joined the drift to the cities. In a piece of journalism, “Straight Talk”, published in 1890, he recognised this as a general social shift.

It was in his very earliest stories that Lawson comes closer than anyone to recreating this situation. “The Union Buries Its Dead” shows how impoverished the routines of daily living become for those in the bush. Though it purports to be about the man who is being buried, the story really focuses on the dead souls of the living. The characters have to do two opposite things. They have to go along to the funeral—they crave companionship—but they also have to suppress the meaning of the funeral. A certain psychological adroitness is necessary to manage both. The mourners are going through elaborate devices to stop themselves having any feelings about the death of the young man. They are adept at anaesthetising their emotions, which is how they survive in the bush. One device they use is to undercut any possible meaning which may arise: “The departed was a ‘Roman’, and the majority of the town were otherwise—but unionism is strong than creed. Drink, however, is stronger than unionism.”

Mateship here is the camaraderie of those who are past caring. The pretences have to be kept up, but feelings and understanding have long since gone. Burlesque behaviour diverts them from the emptiness of it all, as well as perpetuating that emptiness. Lawson’s great triumph as a writer is that he can show how demoralising this is.

In both “The Union Buries Its Dead” and “The Bush Undertaker” the main characters act simply for something to do. They have to find some way of passing the time in the dreadful vacuous stillness they inhabit. Bush life provided no natural patterns of communal activity, like folk festivals in peasant societies, so artificial highlights had to be created to satisfy a longing for sociability and ceremony. The characters have to do things, but at the same time to empty them of meaning, which is quite a feat.

The “mourners” go to the funeral out of curiosity: it is a rare event, a happening which makes this day special. It marks out their life, like a milepost on a lonely road. Similarly the bush undertaker has his Christmas day made when he finds a dead mate: it gives him some novel way of occupying the time. When he comes across the body he says: “Me luck’s in for the day and no mistake!” And then he reflects: “I ain’t a-spendin’ sech a dull Christmas arter all.” In both cases they use incidents, not for their meaning and content, but for their excitement. It keeps them going. Hence the inverted humour of death being lucky.

In a Bulletin article, “Crime in the Bush”, Lawson wrote of the effect of loneliness and monotony on bush people, and described how, after years together, a man will sometimes murder his mate for no explicable reason. Trying to explain this and other equally strange occurrences, Lawson wrote:

Such crimes as those just instanced, and worse, might be described as the ultimate result of a craving for variety—for something better or brighter, perhaps, but, anyway, something different—the protest of the outraged nature of the black or white savage against the—to him—unnatural conditions.

Lawson’s bush characters live in isolation: the bush undertaker, the drover’s wife. They live without a society: this is the essential element that is missing and it drives many to eccentricity. The bush undertaker is an extreme version of the totally self-sufficient farmer gradually becoming a mad hatter. He creates an artificial society around him by talking to his dog, his sheep, his dead friend and to the goannas, as though engaging in dialogue.

In the bush the main society-substitute is the small family of the father (if present), mother and children. They form a unit which has to satisfy all human needs. But a family can’t perform the functions of a society. Lawson’s stories are often about the sadness of the family break-up. The family is meant to be a possible relief from a society-less country. But in fact it becomes the occasion of more sadness as it disintegrates. Andy’s gone to cattle. Mrs Baker has to be deceived. The drover’s wife is being destroyed by the absence of her husband—her children aren’t enough to keep her going. Her moving and pathetic habits, such as gazing at the fashion plates of the Young Ladies’ Journal and dressing up to go for a walk through the lonely bush on Sundays, are memories of a companionable society which she plainly needs but which is no longer available. In the bush the family collapses because it lacks sustenance from sources outside itself.

The feeling in these stories comes from the agonies of young love and courtship, from members of the family leaving home or being absent, and from death. The characters often find these feelings unbearable in their naked form, and they are covered up in various ways, as in the Jack Cornstalk series:

He ‘sheds no tears on leaving home’—if he can help it; but, perhaps, something comes over father suddenly, as he goes through the novel ceremony of shaking hands with his boy—he turns away abruptly, and, in short, ‘acts queer’; and mother’s drawn, sunburnt face pales a shade, and her haggard eyes fill involuntarily—for the first time in years, perhaps. These things move young Jack to hammer more vigorously with a stick on the gable end of the old horse, and to fling his heels wildly against the sides in his hurry to get a start in the rusty machinery inside. Maybe his instinct tells him that what’s out of sight is happily out of the minds of both parties (to a great extent) in the bush.

In his early stories Lawson shows how the habit of not showing your feelings increases the absence and loss; in the later stories Lawson himself indulges in the same sentimental evasion.

In Lawson’s stories people like Jack Cornstalk, who leave farms in the settled districts, usually head further outback to take up jobs such as droving. In some of the best-known Mitchell stories, such as “On the Edge of the Plain”, “Some Day” and “Another of Mitchell’s Plans”, the narrator rationalises his present situation with the belief that settling down is somehow limiting. But at the same time he regretfully reminisces about lost opportunities of getting married or of returning home. In a crucial passage Mitchell senses he has missed out on something—the man he might have been, but wasn’t—and that freedom on the wallaby isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be:

I suppose,” said Mitchell’s mate, as they drank their tea, “I suppose you’ll go back and marry her some day?

Some day! That’s it; it looks like it, doesn’t it? We all say, ‘Some day’. I used to say it ten years ago, and look at me now. I’ve been knocking round for five years, and the last two years constant on the track, and no show of getting off it unless I go for good, and what have I got for it? I look like going home and getting married, without a penny in my pocket or rag to my back scarcely, and no show of getting them. I swore I’d never go back home without a cheque, and, what’s more, I never will; but the cheque days are past. Look at that boot! If we were down among the settled districts we’d be called tramps and beggars; and what’s the difference? I’ve been a fool, I know, but I’ve paid for it; and now there’s nothing for it but to tramp, tramp, tramp for your tucker, and keep tramping till you get old and careless and dirty, and older, and more careless and dirtier, and you get used to the dust and sand, and heat, and flies, and mosquitoes, same as a bullock does, and lose ambition and hope, and get contented with this animal life, like a dog, and till your swag seems part of yourself, and you’d be lost and uneasy and light-shouldered without it; and you don’t care a damn if you’ll ever get work again, or live like a Christian; and you go on like this till the spirit of a bullock takes the place of the heart of a man. Who cares?

Mitchell felt compelled to take up the roving life, but in this rare moment of insight and frankness, he knows he has made the wrong choice. Life on the track is heroicised in bush lore, but awful in reality. Leading this life means you lose your human qualities, you “lose ambition and hope, and get contented with this animal life”. This is one form of deprivation, the deadening of normal feelings. The other form of deprivation is suppressing the realisation of it. As his magnificent diatribe against the wretchedness of his condition mounts to its climax, Mitchell attempts to deny his own instant of self-knowledge by the standard demolishing shrug, “Who cares?” The answer to this question is that Mitchell does, but only on the rare occasions when he can momentarily acknowledge it. Such remorseful reflections are always abruptly terminated—they can’t be entertained for too long.

The Joe Wilson series was an attempt by Lawson, as his own life became more unsatisfactory and remorse was beginning to set in, to imaginatively create the ideal small-farm life of a character who is a surrogate for Lawson-without-his-faults. But even here he can’t sustain the idyll, and the familiar human weaknesses creep in as the story progresses. The latter part of the series is important for its portraits of two women, Brighten’s sister-in-law and Mrs Spicer, who have got “past carin’”. Through drudgery and isolation, they are in a much more advanced state of exhaustion than the drover’s wife.

Lawson gives very different psychological profiles to his men and women characters. The men are personally weak and often have a past they are escaping from. They are withdrawn, uncomfortable in family life and attracted to the life of wandering around. A certain unreality of character enables them to preserve an attractive external bravado. The women, stronger and more resilient, try to control events, or at least endure them. They have often married below themselves, and yearn for a more refined life than the bush can provide. The trying conditions of outback life cause them to become weather-beaten and worn-out, with a tough masculine appearance. In the short term, women survive better than men, but eventually both collapse, the men because of inherent weaknesses, the women because of the strain and solitude of bush life. They have to fill all roles, including that of the father, without support, which proves impossible.

In Lawson’s early journalist pieces we find statements that are quite the opposite of those identified with Lawson in the public mind. In “The City and the Bush” Lawson inveighs against the intolerance and narrowness that shearers display to anything outside their own domain. As he says, “A shearing shed and a pound a hundred is not the end of all things.” Lawson describes in some detail how a young man from the city is mocked daily in the shed to make him conform to the shearers’ ways. Lawson vehemently opposes such initiation rituals, since:

when they get hardened, [they] mostly treat others as they themselves have been treated. This is a cowardly custom, because the victim is generally unable to defend himself. It does no good; it only brutalises men. I can see nothing in it but ignorant brutality. It might be said that such a course of treatment is necessary to “make a man” of a green-hand—or, as bushmen say, to take the ‘trimmings off of him’. But, judging by results, God help such ‘manliness’! I’d prefer a man with the ‘trimmings’ left on.

The “trimmings” were the normal feelings and sensitivities of people. When these were brutally removed, people became “hardened” and it was this “manliness” or exaggerated masculinity which was so admired in the bush. Manliness meant the deadening of feelings: “The spirit of a bullock takes the place of the heart of a man.” The young Lawson was a sensitive, “feminine” personality in a rough society which boosted such manliness. The Lawson who wrote “God help such ‘manliness’!” is the opposite of the Lawson-as-mateship-promoter legend. In another article, “The Bush and the Ideal”, Lawson showed he was aware of the over-optimism of the much-vaunted bush nationalist literature.

How was it that Lawson, who so clearly saw the deficiencies of mateship nationalism, was later to be regarded as its exemplar and champion? This strange turn-about was due first to Lawson himself becoming “past carin’” and turning for comfort to the mateship he had earlier been critical of. And second it was due to his followers projecting the sentiments of this later Lawson back onto his earlier stories. From a comparatively early age Lawson felt the pressure of facing the horror of the bush and recreating it in fiction as intolerable, and he came to adopt evasions analogous to those of the outback inhabitants he describes in his stories. This is first seen in the paragraph which is the climax of “The Union Buries Its Dead”. Here Lawson describes the thoughts that run through the narrator’s mind as the unknown man is buried:

Our grave-digger was not altogether bowelless, and, out of respect for the human quality described as ‘feelin’s’, he scraped up some light and dusty soil and threw it down to deaden the fall of the clay lumps on the coffin. He also tried to steer the first few shovelfuls gently down against the end of the grave with the back of the shovel turned outwards, but the hard, dry Darling River clods rebounded and knocked all the same. It didn’t matter much—nothing does. The fall of lumps of clay on a stranger’s coffin doesn’t sound any different from the fall of the same things on an ordinary wooden box—at least I didn’t notice anything awesome or unusual in the sound; but, perhaps, one of us—the most sensitive—might have been impressed by being reminded of a burial of long ago, when the thump of every sod jolted his heart.

The narrator (closely identified with Lawson himself) takes the same attitude as the characters in the story. He does things “out of respect for that human quality described as ‘feelin’s’”, but he has long ago lost feelings himself. Like the new chum in the shearing shed, he’s had the trimmings knocked off him. Once, he remembers, he had feelings at funerals, but not now. He too has been hardened; he too is now one of the dead souls watching the funeral. When the question of meaning arises he undercuts it too, just as his characters, like Mitchell, do: “It didn’t matter much—nothing does.” He accepts the deadening of his soul; he is “past carin’”. Lawson is now a victim, an example of this attitude as well as its recorder. This was his own way of surviving.

Lawson’s youthful experiences on the farm and in Sydney were gloomy, and his one trip to the outback increased this. When one adds to this his naturally melancholic temperament, his addiction to alcohol, the failure of his trip to London and the breakdown of his marriage, the tragic collapse of his later years comes to seem inevitable. His experiences and his personality reinforced each other, so that it all became too much for him. His acute understanding of the terrible things that were happening to people in Australia made him more depressed, and that depression deepened the gloom, so that in the end the two elements became inextricably mixed.

After the early stories Lawson never again wrote with the same intense focus on the horror of the bush. Unfortunately he adopted certain comforting devices against a naked exposure to it. He admitted as much in an unpublished article in 1913:

Mark the beginning of self-conceit, or self-pity, or degeneration—or my decadence! I had lost the thunder—both far and near—the mighty sympathy, the splendid crudity, and the sledge-hammer force of simplicity of that lonely boy’s song, both in prose and verse. I had found drink and comradeship and comparative happiness—I found Mateship later on.

In Lawson’s case the normal progression from hope to disillusionment is reversed. In his early work he knew how harsh and destructive life in the bush was. Later on he turned to the consolations of nationalism to cover up this early sadness and to pretend that there were great hopes for Australia still. He took up mateship, which he had discounted earlier, as a comforter. This gave his later work and his poetry a facile optimism. He turned to the past as a golden age, the days of the goldfields, Ballarat, Eureka, the days when the world was wide. The old themes were reworked with different emphases and with diminishing results, as Brian Matthews shows in his book on Lawson, The Receding Wave. The atmosphere became saturated with sentimentality and remorse, states in which he lost the ability to have specific emotions, and just felt vaguely emotional about everything. The narrator, or Lawson-surrogate, increasingly succumbed to nostalgia and self-pity.

It was this later and lesser Lawson who became the subject of the legend, and a source of self-congratulation to successive generations of Australians. The public took up a Lawson who was convenient to them, the comforting and relatively pressureless Lawson who praised bush mateship. The sentiments of the later writings were transferred back to his earlier stories which they did not fit. As a result Australians for many decades misread the early stories in such a way that the stark horror was evaded. “The Union Buries Its Dead” was seen as a celebration of bush and union solidarity, and the anthology piece “The Drover’s Wife” was read as praise of the heroic efforts of the outback wife. Brian Matthews is much closer to the truth when he describes the latter story as one not of pioneering steadfastness, but of slow human disintegration.

People saw the more optimistic side of Lawson, because that is what they wanted to see; those parts which fitted in with the Australian legend were emphasised and coloured all the stories, and the more melancholy and depressed parts were ignored. In this way the most priceless legacy of Lawson—his portrayal of reality in the bush—was diminished in the Australian consciousness.

Lawson disliked the present, believing things got worse all the time as you grew up: “Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, and keep them clean, for they’re about the only days when there’s a chance of poetry and beauty coming into this life.” A feeling of not wanting to advance or investigate things obtrudes—any adult experience is a form of despoliation which pollutes the personality. To grow up was to get oneself involved in that wearying and inevitably disappointing struggle with greed, strife and the other complexities of adult life. Like Mitchell, people in Lawson are often frozen in a posture of adolescent restlessness, which they increasingly regret but cannot break away from.

This emphasis on innocence and against experience meant that Lawson reworked his original themes rather than successfully developing new ones. Like the bush families, he was cut off—he had no outlets and no new sources of life. In some of his poems he softened the suffering of the past, in contrast to his early stories:

They carry in their swags, perhaps,

    A portrait and a letter—

And, maybe, deep down in their hearts,

   The hope of “something better”.

Where lonely miles are long to ride,

    And all days seem recurrent,

There’s lots of time to think of men

   They might have been—but weren’t.

This is pressureless mythmaking: the facile mateship, the sentimental letters, the vague hope of “something better”, the hurtless remorse of the “men they might have been—but weren’t”.

These escape routes were temporary and never solved Lawson’s problems. Joseph Furphy was able to lose himself in contemplating the balmy strangeness of the Riverina plains. No such way was possible for Lawson. All he could do was to sentimentalise the horrors he had once rendered so starkly:

Now up and down the siding brown

   The great black crows are flyin’,

And down below the spur, I know,

   Another “milker’s” dyin’;

The crops have withered from the ground,

   The tank’s clay bed is glarin’,

But from my heart no tear nor sound,

   For I have gone past carin’—

      Past worryin’ or carin’,

      Past feelin’ aught or carin’;

      But from my heart no tear nor sound,

      For I have gone past carin’.

In this vignette of the small-farm collapse—the cows dying and the children also, the husband gone shearing—the exemplary Lawson story is retold but without the earlier atmospheric directness. The emotions are glazed over with self-pity, and a giving-up has long since been accommodated.

In this state Lawson was able to indulge in a number of diversions: facile optimism, republicanism, sentimentality. The idea that you could anaesthetise yourself and believe that nothing matters was given a spurious legitimacy in Australia by reference to Lawson. His later writings were such a jumble of vague attitudes that almost anything could be justified in his name. And as his actual presence receded in time, he was regarded as a distant saint, who went through it on behalf of us all.

His early prose writing is a priceless legacy of a crucial experience which nobody else was able to capture. Now we see it as it was, and this has increased his reputation. The fact that he couldn’t keep it up for long can be explained by the tension between the hopes he had and the horror he felt, a tension which eventually tore him apart. Nobody wants to blame him for this. But by giving his work a legendary status, both a national giving-up and a spurious national success story were legitimised.