Grenfell Greats - Henry Lawson

Oh Henry!

Stony broke and addicted to alcohol, in 1892 poet and writer Henry Lawson was given a one-way rail ticket to the back o’ Bourke by the editor of the Bulletin, to “search for ‘copy’ in that Darling River town”.

One of the things that fired Lawson’s imagination during his outback stint was The Salvation Army band that played outside Bourke’s Carriers Arms Hotel, inspiring him to write “Booth’s Drum” (“We were blasphemous and beery/We were free from creed or care,/’Til they sent their prettiest lassies/And they broke our centre there”).

And it was a sweet, angelic, golden-haired “Army” girl who became the heroine of Lawson’s short story “That Pretty Girl in the Army”.

Chaperoned by a formidable, middle-aged female Salvo – “about six-feet high, flat and broad, [with a] square face, and a mouth like a joint in boiler plates” – the Pretty Girl holds a fascination for the local blokes, and when she sells The War Cry they go like hot cakes, one smitten male taking three copies.

Henry Lawson.

But all is not well with the Pretty Girl and she becomes pale, thin and listless. One hot Christmas Day handsome shearer Jack Moonlight blows into town, stops for a drink at the Carriers Arms and, in a decidedly Mills and Boon scenario, the Pretty Girl cries, “Jack! Why did you go away and leave me?” to which he replies, “But you told me to go!” before they fall into each other’s arms.

“With a woman it’s love or religion; with a man it’s love or the devil,” one of Lawson’s characters observes.

After Lawson’s poem “The Good Samaritan” was published in The War Cry of 13 September 1930, his publishers, Angus and Robertson, wrote to the editor: “The poet had a great respect for the Army, and nothing would have pleased him more than to see the verses in your paper.”