Henry Lawson: sad-eyed, brittle, intermittently brilliant…

by
Professor Brian Matthews

For a while there, once the wars were over and the twentieth century had a chance to hit some sort of stride, it seemed as if Henry Lawson – his works, life and imprint upon our culture – had failed to survive the upheavals. Students were apparently not interested and schools and universities, of course, taught little Australian material. When they did, Lawson would get the nod with ‘The Loaded Dog’ and, perhaps, ‘Andy’s Gone with Cattle’ or ‘The Roaring Days’.

It’s true that in the second half of the sixties and the early seventies there didn’t seem to be much going on in the realm of Lawson studies outside the ‘college walls’. But this was a false impression.

At the time, I personally discovered its falsity simply by publishing something on Lawson that not only revealed my university affiliations but also attracted the attention of the daily press. Then, stampeding out of the woodwork came the Lawson cheer squad looking for slights and insults and with knuckle dusters poised. Being young, green, wide-eyed, enthusiastic and convinced that I was right, this stampede was for me a scarifying experience. After being worked over by the Lawson bodyguards, I decided that my true career lay not in literature or universities or schools but working on a prawn trawler out of Tin Can Bay. Later, I resolved to carry on but I marvelled at how and why the sad-eyed, brittle, intermittently brilliant Henry Lawson could have become the excuse for such venom and general nastiness.

Things have changed somewhat yet it remains true that a case needs to be made for Lawson’s poems and ballads. Schumann’s marvellous translation of the ballads to music has made that case in spades. Lawson’s verse is simple and uncomplicated but it has a timeless quality. This is because it is so thoroughly and single mindedly concerned with what it is to be human. Which is to hope, to love, to fail, to be triumphant, to be humiliated, to be self pitying, to lose, to contemplate the end . . .

Without ever losing this essential focus, Schumann has lifted Lawson’s rhythms and rhymes into the 21st century. He gives them a new, exciting and urgent pressure the likes of which they must have had in the 1880s and 90s. Lawson’s poems have been set to music before this, but never with such an intuitive and dramatic understanding of the passion, fervour and intensity which engendered them and which stereotyping over the years has tended to blunt. Listen to Schumann’s driving rendition of ‘Faces in the Street’. Or notice the resigned yet angry irony with which he imbues his version of ‘Second Class Wait Here’. Or hear the gentle pathos of ‘Hannah’. In all of these Lawson’s nineteenth century imaginative vision is being re-invented and renewed by contemporary Australian voices and the sounds of modern rock and folk. In these thirteen songs, Henry Lawson is brought respectfully – but with terrific verve and dynamism – into our time. Not only does he survive the journey; listening to these songs, you would think he had written with us in mind. Assuredly, Lawson would greet his balladry, as John Schumann has interpreted it, with a wry smile of delighted approval.