[Editor: This short story, by Gertrude Lawson, regarding Henry Lawson, was published in Aussie: The Cheerful Monthly (Sydney, NSW), 15 October 1921.]
The birth of Henry Lawson
By Gertrude Lawson (sister of the poet).
At sunset a little more than half a century ago, a dray — heavily laden with a curious collection of oddments which constituted the paraphernalia of a married digger, and drawn by a big, raw-boned, flea-bitten grey — rocked and jolted its way towards the new rush at Grenfell.
A man led the horse — a short, thick-set man, who walked with a sprightly step on a pair of tidy feet. The usual broad-brimmed cabbage-tree hat covered a luxuriant crop of auburn hair and shaded from the sun’s glare a pair of eyes as blue and as clear as the summer sky above him. A short, carefully-trimmed beard hid a small, well-moulded mouth and strong, short teeth. A loosely-tied kerchief, spotlessly white, protected the neck from the sun.
There was something about the poise of the well-balanced head and the carriage of the symmetrical body that spoke of silence and reserve, while the forehead, square, high and blue-veined, suggested the power of deep analytic thought.
Hundreds of miles he had followed this rough-hewn track. Often his only guide had been a bough bent down or a rough pointer scratched by a digger mate who had preceded him over drought-stricken hill, plain and valley to the El Dorado of their dreams. The square-set shoulders and springing walk belied the weariness of soul caused by the nerve-racking dangers and heavy responsibility of that journey.
A woman followed the dray — a girl-woman nearly twenty years his junior. Still in her mid-teens, she was tall and lithesome, and moved along with all the dignity of a proper queen. She was clad in a lilac frock, rough leather lace-up boots covered the Grecian foot, and a “Granny” bonnet protected her head from the blazing summer sun. Now, as the sun was setting, she removed the bonnet, and, swinging it by the strings, lifted up her face to the cooling air. Then from her lips poured a flood of melody, and for the first time the Weddin Mountains heard that grand old pæan: Let the Hills resound with song.
Sung in a sweet soprano, the top notes rivalled those of the birds.
Thus Peter Lawson, a Norwegian, and his wife Louise, an Australian, came to their camping-ground at Grenfell, to seek for gold and await the advent of their first-born.
The man unharnessed, belled and hobbled the horse, and turned him towards the Flat; gathered an armful of wood; brought water; then lopped off branches of gum and dragged them campward.
The woman kindled the fire and cooked the simple supper. Next she set to work to break off from boughs the twigs which she laid in rows in the newly-pitched tent, thus forming a resting-place. Blankets were carried in, and presently she lay down, wearied out with the day’s journey.
From the hundreds of tents above them were wafted down familiar sounds — a mingled melody from different instruments and songs sung in different languages.
Two men whistling a duet approached the camp. Sleepily, through the crack in the tent-door, she saw them join her husband at the camp-fire. One was bigger and broader than her husband; the other was tall and slight. Their eager talk fell drowsily upon her ear, but it was in a language that she could not understand. Presently, she fell asleep. …
Next day the tent was stretched over neatly-made framework, two bunks were fashioned of bush poles, and bags and calico ticks filled with dry grass were laid upon them. The fly was pulled taut, and the inner walls of the tent reinforced with bags tidily whitewashed. Around the tent a trench was dug and a break-wind of boughs erected. In a day or two the camp was completed with a bark-roofed galley containing a hanging-safe in front. For the horse, a yard around some convenient trees was constructed of saplings. A white goat, which appeared from nowhere, was tethered close by.
Leaving the girl-wife to her own resources from daylight to dark — the one woman amongst 7000 men — the digger now turned his attention to the real business that had brought him there.
Rarely did she leave the camp; instead, she spent long hours sitting on a gin-case and looking out upon the scene before her.
“Oh, who could paint a gold-field,
And limn the picture right,
As we have often seen it
In early morning’s light?
The yellow mounds of mullock
With spots of red and white,
The scattered quartz that glistened
Like diamonds in light;
The azure line of ridges,
The bush of darkest green,
The little homes of calico
That dotted all the scene.”
The ideas in those lines were impressed upon the mind of her unborn infant and were to be given expression in words twenty years afterwards.
She read her few books — Pope, Longfellow, Poe, Browning — and memorised long extracts. In her beautiful soprano voice she sang such songs as Scenes That Are Brightest, The Last Rose of Summer, Kathleen Mavourneen — the songs that will never die. She composed poetry and wove her themes into the stitchery of the tiny dresses upon which she spent such infinite pains. One of them is before me now. The skirt is of four widths of nainsook, hand-tucked, and feather-stitched from hem to waist. The body is low-necked and short-sleeved, hand-embroidered, edged with hand-made embroidery a bare half-inch in width. She crocheted shawls and booties of fleecy wool and embroidered dainty burrow coats with finest silk. Could any baby have been better prepared for?
All this dainty raiment by the girl-mother was packed in a red gin-case, which she stored away under a rough bunk. And always she dreamt dreams and wove them into verse throughout the livelong day. Her brooding anxiety was for the company of another woman — a woman to be with her at the supreme moment. At last one was discovered, two miles away. Peter Lawson’s wife contented herself with writing and working feverishly to break the monotony of waiting and to dispel the clinging fear. She was glad — ah, very glad! — when each came to its close. Of this she wrote:
“’Tis then that the hard view taken
Of the things in the day glare seen
Will soften and tint and waken
And tone ’neath a twilight screen.”
After the prolonged drought the rain set in and the low ground was covered with flood waters. The nurse had to be carried over two miles of flooded country to help to bring the child into the world. She returned to her home the same evening, and the next day could not come at all; so the delicate baby, who had such a precarious grip upon life, and his girl-mother, were left helpless. The ignorance of the men became the ally of neglect. Milk fever set in, with its attendant delirium, and in a short time mother and son lingered upon the borderland. Diggers who so often had crept near the camp to hear that wonderful voice pouring out its rippling melody shrank away and closed their ears as it rang out hoarse and broken with fever.
Three foreigners stood helpless while the Australian wife and baby rapidly drifted almost beyond reach of human aid. Leaden skies stretched overhead, and a deluge of rain beat upon the frail calico, that protected the stricken mother and son from the elements.
There the men stood with features masked, expressionless, as Norsemen will in agony. Two had loved her and one had won her for his wife.
The Bonnie Hills of Scotland which she had sung unweariedly in her delirium over and over again for an hour changed to There’s a Land That is Fairer Than Day. The big man of the three gripped Lawson’s hands.
“I am going for Whiley,” he said.
“Useless,” answered Lawson. “Whiley’s drunk.”
“Whiley’s coming!” said the big man over his shoulder as he faded into the coming darkness.
He saddled Blucher, the patient fly-bitten grey, who acted in every capacity from saddle-hack to dray-horse, and before he mounted he carefully placed some object in his right-hand coat-pocket.
The big man could never say quite clearly how he reached the cave that night, where he found the doctor sitting over the fire and talking rapidly to himself.
When he became aware of the big man’s presence he sprang up, his fierce black eyes blazing out of his swarthy face. The two men faced each other, one maddened with drink, the other desperate with anxiety.
“There’s a woman dying down at the camp, Whiley. You have got to come.”
“Got to come, have I? Damn the woman. Let her die! Get out,” barked the drunken doctor.
“There’s a baby,” pleaded the big man. “It’s dying.”
“Let it die! One more or less doesn’t matter.”
The big man felt in his pocket and what he found there reassured him.
“It’s your life or theirs, Whiley,” he warned. “I have not come here to waste time or words. She has milk fever and is delirious. There’s only another woman, and she is cut off by the flood. Is there one spark of humanity in you?”
“There’s not. But I’ll come. Go and get ‘The Devil.’ She’s down in the hollow yonder.”
The big man brought up the slender, sinewy Devil, and saddled her. The doctor came out of the cave, followed by an ugly bull-bitch, who stuck close to his heels and sniffed excitedly at his overcoat. Before he mounted he bent down and patted her. “You have got to give way to the human, old girl,” he said.
Silently they rode, slushing through mud and rain until the camp was reached. A tearful moon had broken the bondage of her clouds and was shedding a pale, misty light over the camp; and over the flood water she had flung out a gleaming finger. From the tents above neither light nor sound came; for the only woman among them was dying, and the depressed diggers had retired early to their bunks.
In the Sweet Bye-and-Bye sang the voice from the tent, but it was little more than a whisper now.
The doctor dismounted, stripped off his overcoat, which he hung upon a convenient branch, the bull-bitch taking her place beneath it and whining to her master pitifully. Quickly he entered the tent.
The girl was sitting straight up, her face flushed, her eyes glaring in terror. The baby was held at arms’ length right over her head. “A black snake!” she shrieked. “A black snake!” The doctor stepped forward just in time to catch the flying infant, whom he placed unhurt in the other bunk. Then his hands gripped the shrieking woman and bore her back upon her pillows. His dark, saturnine face had softened — softened wonderfully in the presence of outraged nature.
He went out into the night air and breathed hard. Alcohol is a cruel master. Peter offered him broth, which he accepted readily. He tied the protesting bull-bitch strongly, and then from his coat-pockets he took two puppies.
“Nature is the only remedy I have,” he said apologetically to Peter, and disappeared within the tent. In a little while the noisy mutterings of the girl ceased, and presently the doctor carried his improvised breast-pumps into the open air and laid them at their mother’s feet. They were too bloated to stand, so rolled helplessly upon their backs with their tiny paws stretched at obtuse angles, their apologies for tails waving feebly, while their puzzled mother nosed them doubtfully.
The doctor sponged and tended his patient, made up the other bunk and lifted her, gowned freshly, into it. Then he turned his attention to the baby.
Poor mite! It was clammy with three days’ neglect. The scalp and eyes were septic, and God alone knew in what state was the body. He took up the layette, and wonderingly ran his fingers over the dainty tracery of needlework, the while he searched the features of the bush girl for an indication of the refinement that had prompted their making. Having stripped the baby, he dressed the neglected skin with the only remedy he had — goats’ cream. He bathed, clothed, fed and soothed the little one to sleep, and then went out to sit silent and brooding over the fire, while just outside its ruddy gleams a big man hovered with his hand in his pocket. The night dragged through its weary length at last, and day broke sullen and chill, with grey mists rising dense off the waste of waters.
“Peter, bring me a cup of tea.”
The girl’s voice, with a snap, broke the tension of the night’s vigil.
Peter moved deftly about to supply the want. Filling the pannikin, he sweetened it with brown sugar, and was adding a generous quantity of goat’s milk when the doctor’s voice pulled him up:
“Good God, man! That’s the root of the trouble. You have been killing her with that milk. That caused the milk fever.”
He went to the bedside.
“Look here, young woman, you can have your tea, but first you must nurse your baby.”
“Oh, doctor!” she said pleadingly.
“I know it’s going to be agony,” he sympathised, “but it has to be done to benefit both.”
Her teeth gritted as the child’s lips found its nourishment.
“How did these scratches come?” she inquired.
“Perhaps in your delirium,” he replied evasively. “Anyhow scratches or no scratches he has to be nursed, and when you have nursed him a few times you can have milk in your tea.”
Another day he attended the patients and between whiles moped over the fire, apparently oblivious of the lurking shadow of a big man in the middle distance. Peter was kept busy brewing broth for the doctor, and tea for his wife.
The water had subsided and the nurse was thus enabled to return to her post. Doctor Whiley’s work was done. He mounted “The Devil,” and from his saddle looked down upon Peter, hesitated, and then spoke:
“Things are not going to be easy for her,” he said, with a nod towards the tent. “She is highly strung, sensitive, intellectual. You” (and he looked into Peter’s eyes with a man’s understanding) — “you know what you are. The qualities of both yourself and your wife may be combined in the boy. He is delicate — head and eyes may not heal for twelve months. He has to pay the penalty of neglect. Perhaps it may be lifelong. You are going to have a bad time with him, but it may be worth while. Personally, I think living is a fool’s game. That is why I am no longer a doctor. I have given life to those two. In that I’ve not been kind. Goodnight.”
And he, a son of darkness, rode back into the night, seeking oblivion from what?
But for Australia he had kept a light burning that some day would flash out the blue flame of genius.
Source:
Aussie: The Cheerful Monthly (Sydney, NSW), 15 October 1921, pp. 12-13
Also published in:
The Brunswick & Coburg Leader (Melbourne, Vic.), 22 September 1922, p. 3 [entitled “Where there were no nurses: A confinement on the goldfields in early times: The birth of Henry Lawson, poet”]
Editor’s notes:
azure = the blue of a clear unclouded sky
borderland = (in the context of death) the border area between live and death, or the border area between the land of the living and the land of the afterlife
Browning = [1] Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), an English poetess (née Moulton-Barrett)
See: “Elizabeth Barrett Browning”, Wikipedia
Browning = [2] Robert Browning (1812-1889) an English poet and playwright
See: “Robert Browning”, Wikipedia
bull-bitch = a female bulldog
cabbage-tree hat = a wide-brimmed hat made from the leaves of the Australian cabbage tree; they were commonly worn in colonial Australia
calico = [1] plain cotton cloth, usually of a white or cream colour; plain unbleached cotton cloth; plain-woven cotton cloth with a printed pattern (usually with the pattern printed on one side of the cloth); (British usage) heavy plain white cotton cloth; plain cotton cloth from India; the name is derived from Calicut (also known as Kozhikode), a city in India, where the fabric was obtained in early years
See: “Calico”, Wikipedia
calico = [2] (in the context of the goldfields of the 19th century) plain cotton cloth used in the construction of tents
calico tick = a mattress cover made from calico; a sheet of calico used to make a mattress covering, which wraps around or contains the filling of a mattress
digger = a gold digger, someone seeking gold by digging in the ground (usually referring to men); a miner
El Dorado = (Spanish) “the gilded one”; a place of abundant wealth (especially of gold) or great opportunity; as a place, this was originally a reference to a wealthy gold-laden land or city that was believed to be located somewhere in South America, but the term has since been used to refer to any place of real or imagined wealth or opportunity (“the gilded one”, i.e. someone covered in gold, was originally a reference to a South American tribal chief who, as an initiation rite, covered himself with gold dust and dove into a lake)
gin-case = a wooden box designed to contain bottles of gin
grey = a horse of a grey or whitish colour; a horse with a grey coat (a “dapple-grey” is a horse with a mixture of white and dark hairs on its coat, distributed in a mottled or spotted manner)
gum = gum tree (many, but not all, species of the genus Eucalyptus are known as gum trees)
hanging-safe = a construction designed to keep meat safe from animals (including rodents and insects), and to keep meat cool (especially if hung in a draughty spot, or in a shady place); hanging-safes were suspended from above, e.g. from a ceiling, a beam, or (if outside) a tree branch; hanging-safes could be made out of wood, tin, or cloth (usually with a solid top and bottom section, or with hoops), with a metal hook at the top to suspend it from a rope, metal chain, or length of wire
Kathleen Mavourneen = a song which was popular in the 19th century; the music was composed by Frederick Crouch, the lyrics were written by Julia M. Crawford (“Mavourneen” derives from the Irish “mo mhuirnín”, meaning “my darling”)
See: 1) Pascal Tréguer, “‘Kathleen Mavourneen’: meaning and origin”, Word Histories
2) “My Darling Kathleen”, Traditional Tune Archive [“written in 1837 by Julia M. Crawford”]
3) “Kathleen Mavourneen”, All Poetry
4) “Kathleen Mavourneen”, Wikipedia
kerchief = (vernacular) handkerchief
Longfellow = Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), an American poet, educator, and writer; he was born in Portland (District of Maine, Massachusetts, USA in 1807, and died in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA) in 1882
See: 1) “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: American poet”, Encyclopaedia Britannica
2) “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, Wikipedia
limn = to draw or paint on a surface; or to outline in clear sharp detail; or describe in words (from Middle English “limnen”, to illuminate, with regard to manuscripts, possibly derived from the Latin “illuminare”)
mullock = mining refuse, rubbish; dirt, gravel, clay, stone, and other earthen materials which remain after ore has been separated (the unwanted earthen materials are often placed in a big pile outside of a mine, i.e. in a mullock heap)
’neath = (vernacular) beneath
pæan = a poem, hymn, or song of joy, praise, thanksgiving, or triumph; a piece of artwork, film, song, or written work that gives great praise (can be rendered as “paean” or “pæan”; a rare alternative spelling is “pean”)
pannikin = a small metal pan, or a small metal cup (also spelt: panakin, panikin, pannican)
Poe = Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic; he was born as Edgar Poe in Boston (Massachusetts, USA) in 1809, and died in Baltimore (Maryland, USA) in 1849
See: “Edgar Allan Poe”, Wikipedia
Pope = Alexander Pope (1688-1744), an English poet, translator, and satirist; he was born in London (England) in 1688, and died in Twickenham (Middlesex, England) in 1744
See: “Alexander Pope”, Wikipedia
rush = (in the context of gold) a gold rush; a hurried move by a lot of people to an area where a discovery of gold has been made, where they set up camp and begin mining or looking for gold
saturnine = gloomy, melancholic, sullen, surly; dark in colour; mysterious; slow, sluggish (a reference to the supposed effects of being under influence the influence of the planet Saturn, which was regarded in earlier times as the planet furthest from the Sun and therefore cold in temperature and slow in its planetary revolutions
supreme moment = a moment in time in which an important, very significant, or life-changing event occurs (e.g. the birth of a baby)
swarthy = dark or darkish in colour; dark-skinned, skin with a dark or olive complexion; skin which has been darkened, tanned, or weathered by the sun; black
’tis = (archaic) a contraction of “it is”
yonder = at a distance; far away
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