The extraordinary rise, devastating fall and enduring legacy of an
Australian icon
Henry Lawson captured the heart and soul of Australia and its people
with greater clarity and truth than any writer before him. Born on the
goldfields in 1867, he became the voice of ordinary Australians,
recording the hopes, dreams and struggles of bush battlers and slum
dwellers, of fierce independent women, foreign fathers and larrikin
mates.
Lawson wrote from the heart, documenting what he saw from his earliest
days as a poor, lonely, handicapped boy with warring parents on a
worthless farm, to his years as a literary lion, then as a hopeless
addict cadging for drinks on the streets, and eventually as a prison
inmate, locked up in a tiny cell beside murderers. A controversial
figure today, he was one of the first writers to shine a light on the
hardships faced by Australia's hard-toiling wives and mothers, and among
the first to portray, with sympathy, the despair of Indigenous
Australians at the ever-encroaching European tide. His heroic figures
such as The Drover's Wife and the fearless unionists striking out for a
better deal helped define Australia's character, and while still a young
man, his storytelling drew comparisons on the world stage with Tolstoy,
Gorky and Kipling.
But Henry Lawson's own life may have been the most compelling saga of
all, a heart-breaking tale of brilliance, lost love, self-destruction
and madness. Grantlee Kieza, the author of critically acclaimed
bestselling biographies of such important figures as Banjo Paterson,
Joseph Banks, Lachlan Macquarie and John Monash, reveals the
extraordinary rise, devastating fall and enduring legacy of an
Australian icon.
