I can relate to the people Lawson is talking about, though my experience was almost a century later.’ And his approach is contemporary in that he writes with a conscious and explicit awareness of the twenty-first century Australia into which Lawson’s stories are now being introduced as a Penguin Classic (The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, $26.95 pb, 243 pp). He conjures with the question of race – ‘I really struggle with Lawson’s racism’, he says in the modern argot. His reminder to us of the Australia Lawson was writing about – one ‘constructed out of the destruction and dispossession of the traditional owners of the land’ – is equally a proposition of our time. And he takes account of modern sensibilities in the language that belongs to them: ‘I read a disturbing comment the other day about how we can’t judge Lawson by the “PC” standards of our time. Well, wrong is wrong.’

And so, led with impeccable critical judgement by John Barnes and refreshingly and innovatively by John Kinsella, we come again to Henry Lawson …

In ‘Some Day’, one of the Mitchell sketches, Jack Mitchell is uncharacteristically gloomy. Yarning late by the campfire, with ‘the moon getting low down through the mulga’, he recalls falling in love years ago with a girl he was ‘properly struck on’. Diffident and tentative, convinced she would never ‘look at a rough, ugly, ignorant brute’ like him, he let the chance slip. Hard up and forced to take a job up country, he is stunned to find how distressed she was when he left.

       ‘Just then she turned her face to the light, and I saw she was crying. She was trembling all over. Suddenly she said, “Jack, Jack,” just like that and held up her arms like this.’

       Mitchell was speaking in a tone of voice that didn’t belong to him, and his mate looked up. Mitchell’s face was solemn and his eyes were fixed on the fire.

       ‘I suppose you gave her a good hug then, and a kiss?’ asked the mate.

       ‘I s’pose so,’ snapped Mitchell. ‘There’s some things a man doesn’t want to joke about … Well, I think we’ll shove on one of the billies and have a drink of tea before we turn in.’         ‘I suppose,’ said Mitchell’s mate, as they drank their tea, ‘I suppose you’ll go back and marry her some day?’

The most striking – and typical – feature of this exchange is not the ease with which Lawson manages the vernacular to register Mitchell’s pain against his mate’s awkward attempts to assuage it, impressive though that is, but the profound and wounded silence to which both men are reduced but which is conveyed to us by a literal absence of sound. After Mitchell ‘shoves on’ the billy, the next words are spoken ‘as they drink their tea’. In the meantime, the billy has boiled – a period of several minutes during which nothing has been said.

This artistic use of the literal space between actions and words is the very essence of the short story, a narrative in which much must be told, implied and barely hinted at with restraint and economy. This was especially true of the ‘sketch’ form that Lawson is using here and which he brought to a pitch of perfection in his collection While the Billy Boils (1896). It is reminiscent of Hemingway in, among other places, ‘Big Two-Hearted River’. This is by no means a sketch, but it does make demands upon the reader that are similar to Lawson’s undocumented silence between his two travellers. Hemingway’s Nick Adams is described as he prepares to set up camp and go fishing. The succession of movements and deliberate actions – he did this and then he did that, he picked this up and he put that down – seems puzzlingly overwrought, obsessive with discrete detail, on first encounter. Only later, or on a second or third reading – as many as it takes to notice Lawson’s billy-boiling silence between the two men – does it become apparent that Nick Adams’s deliberation is a calculated ploy to stop him thinking back on terrors and horrors that he is strenuously trying to escape and repress: ‘He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there in the good place …’

The horror haunts Mitchell, too.

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, just 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 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? If we hadn’t found the track yesterday we might have lain and rotted in that lignum, and no one been any wiser – or sorrier …

Apologetically Mitchell breaks off, admitting to being ‘a bit out of sorts’; but his reminder to his mate that a ‘long dry stretch’ lies ahead of them on the next day takes on much more than mere geographical significance in the penumbra of the bleak and existential terror implicit in the outburst that preceded it. Like Nick Adams, Mitchell has his protective strategies: ‘They rolled out their swags on the sand, lay down, and wrapped themselves in their blankets. Mitchell covered his face with a piece of calico, because the moonlight and wind kept him awake.’

Lawson’s correspondence with his aunt, Emma Brookes, during his stint in Bourke and environs (1892–93), documents the experiences – ‘copy’, as he called it – on which a sketch like ‘Some Day’ was based and, in turn, the artistry with which he transforms the raw material to evoke Mitchell’s character and desperate plight.

You can have no idea of the horrors of the country out here. Men tramp and beg and live like dogs … We walk as far as we can – according to the water – and then lie down and roll ourselves in our blankets. The flies start at daylight and we fight them all day till dark – then mosquitoes start … Got bushed on a lignum plain Sunday before last and found the track at four o’clock in the afternoon … [16 January 1893] … I find that I’ve tramped more than 300 miles since I left here [Bourke] last. That’s all I ever intend to do with a swag [6 February 1893].

If Mitchell’s gloom weighs a little heavily on the narrative of ‘Some Day’, there is no such overt dejection in ‘On The Edge of a Plain’, possibly Lawson’s greatest achievement in the sketch form. While they rest in the mulga shade, Mitchell tells his mate how he had returned home after an absence of eight years, only to find that ‘a blundering fool of a fellow that got down the day before me told the old folks that he’d heard I was dead’. When the family recovers from the shock of his reappearance – ‘They thought at first I was a ghost, and then they all tried to get hold of me at once, nearly smothered me’ – their attentions and ministrations and those of visiting neighbours and friends are claustrophobic. Finally, Mitchell has to swear on the Bible that he would not leave home again while ‘the old folks were alive’.

Mitchell’s recollection of his city and family sojourn is serially punctuated by his attention to his thirsty puppy, the lighting of his pipe, drinking from the water bag and cutting tobacco with a knife. Inexorably, the constraints of family and city are posed against the freedom of life on the track. Mitchell, as he explains, does not last long at home, despite his reassurances.

       ‘You broke your promise about leaving home,’ said his mate.

       Mitchell stood up, stretched himself, and looked dolefully from his heavy swag to the wide, hot, cotton-bush plain ahead.

       ‘Oh yes,’ he yawned, ‘I stopped home for a week, and then they began to growl because I couldn’t get any work to do.’

       The mate guffawed and Mitchell grinned. They shouldered the swags, with the pup on top of Mitchell’s, took up their billies and water-bags, turned their unshaven faces to the wide hazy distance and left the timber behind them.

In the end, life in the wide open spaces and on the track offers no more comfort and hope than civilised, industrious existence in organised society. For all its lightness of touch, the sardonic humour of the two mates and the superficially attractive freedom of their existence, ‘On The Edge of a Plain’ captures subliminally the existential horror of their plight – burdened, moving on pointlessly into an unknown future, leaving complexities and responsibilities behind them. In about 150 words, Lawson catches the desperation of a life lived without real purpose, a life from which meaning seems to have been withdrawn, a life without any ‘comforters’, as Manning Clark would have put it.

Kinsella suggests that nation-making – ‘so central to Lawson’s belief and identity, and much of his writing’ – gets in the way of our penetrating to the ‘literary heart of what [he] achieved’. Certainly, there is plenty of tub-thumping in Lawson’s ballads. He was a poet and known as one before he ever wrote a story, and his identity as a poet persisted long after his death in 1922. But I don’t think nation-making is a factor in his best fiction. His plotless, often pared-down stories did not appeal to his contemporaries because they did not understand what he was trying to do.

As Barnes points out, even A.G. Stephens, the gun critic of his day and a supporter and encourager of Lawson, could not reconcile the fragmentary character of the stories with his own conception of the short story – ‘single plotted, climaxed …’ It wasn’t nation-making that got between Lawson and his readers, it was the fact that he was conducting a revolution in the nature of the short story in this country, eschewing models with formal neatness, a twist in the tale, a beginning, a middle and an end and an identifiable climax, in favour of a kind of pre-modernist reticence, a withdrawing from the idea of conventional order, and a quality of observation that endowed the external world with a sense of eerie, symbolic possibility without ever finally endorsing it. There is the bush undertaker, haunted by what he mistakenly and, after a while fearfully, concludes is a flock of goannas: ‘… he saw a black object coming over the ridge-pole. He grabbed his gun and fired. The thing disappeared. He ran round to the other side of the hut, and there was a great black goanna in violent convulsions on the ground.’ He realises this ‘cuss-o’-God wretch’ had been following him and the body of Brummy that he was lugging to burial. And there is the burning of the snake in ‘The Drover’s Wife’, a familiar enough action that takes on a ritualistic quality: the goanna was the curse of God; the dog, Alligator, attacks the snake ‘as if he felt the original curse in common with mankind’:

She lifts the mangled reptile on the point of her stick, carries it to the fire and throws it in; then piles on the wood and watches the snake burn … The dirty-legged boy stands for a moment in his shirt, watching the fire. Presently he looks up at her, sees the tears in her eyes, and throwing his arms round her neck, exclaims:

       ‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blast me if I do!’

       And she hugs him to her worn-out breast and they sit thus together as the sickly daylight breaks over the bush.

Both Kinsella and Barnes alert us, as we embark on refamiliarising ourselves with Lawson, that legend and received wisdom – for example, about ‘mateship’ – can distort and even diminish the nature of his achievement. As Kinsella rightly remarks: ‘At his best he transcends the very bush, the very outback, the very up-country, the very pub or selector’s hut he conveys with such brevity and yet so acutely: he makes specific places universal. Lawson speaks a language that can travel everywhere and remain loyal to its region, its place of origin.’ And Barnes: ‘The “Lawson legend” was not groundless – legends seldom are – but it was a partial and distorting view of a writer of individual gifts, and it fostered an uncritical attitude which discouraged intelligent scrutiny of what he had written … What he offered … was not an inclusive transcript of bush life but an intense and narrow personal vision … This “inward-looking vision” [the phrase was used of Lawson by New Zealand short story writer Frank Sargeson] was very different from the “gospel of mateship” with which Lawson has been identified …’ These are important observations and are characteristic of the aspirations of both scholars – Barnes in 1986, Kinsella in 2009 – to position Lawson where his true greatness will be clearly seen, to divest his image and his work of distracting assumptions and baggage that have clung so tenaciously since his state funeral.

Having taken pointers from both the introductions, the experience of reading The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories from cover to cover becomes a process of rediscovery. There is the Lawsonian humour: ‘… said Steelman to Smith … “There’s too much humour and levity in this camp to suit a serious scientific gentleman like myself”’ (‘The Geological Spieler’); and irony: ‘I believe Burke and Wills found Hungerford, and it’s a pity they did’ (‘Hungerford’); and deceptive simplicity, as in any of the Mitchell sketches; and pitch-perfect vernacular: ‘Andy and I stared at [the portrait of] Wellington meeting Blucher on the field at Waterloo. I thought the artist had heaped up the dead a bit extra …’ (‘Telling Mrs Baker’); and laconically brilliant landscapes: ‘Draw a wire fence and a few ragged gums, and add some scattered sheep running away from the train. Then you’ll have the bush all along the New South Wales Western line from Bathurst on’; and so on.

Above all, though – and this is hinted at in both introductions – Lawson’s characters inhabit a world from which much of the meaning has been withdrawn. The drover’s wife dresses herself and the children in their best clothes and goes for a walk on Sunday afternoons because she dimly recognises that there was a Sunday ritual that once held some meaning. ‘There is nothing to see however and not a soul to meet.’ Burying his mate Brummy, the bush undertaker knows there is a form of words and a special meaning to the ceremony he is trying to conduct. He knows that ‘Theer oughter be somethin’ sed’, but he can’t remember it; he has lost all touch with the ideas and rituals that once gave meaning to such moments. Mrs Spicer, likewise, clings desperately to a dimly remembered sense of order and purpose, but it has diminished to an obsession with manic flurries of housekeeping and the need to water the geraniums. Mitchell, for all his amiability, philosophical musings and wit, shoulders his swag and tramps the tracks without hope or purpose. And even Joe Wilson’s story, with its small successes and gradual achievement, is actually suffused with suppressed dark notes that prefigure eventual tragedy and loss.

In their very different ways, Kinsella and Barnes seek to isolate and understand what it is that gives Lawson a claim to greatness. This undertaking was still necessary in 1986 when Barnes wrote his influential introduction. A decade earlier, serious critical study of Lawson’s work and literary standing could attract ferocious reactions. Territorialism was strenuous, and attempts to untangle Lawson from various political, cultural and historical webs and discuss him as a writer who could bear comparison with some of the greatest of the genre often attracted strident objections and were usually branded with that lowest of all epithets, ‘academic’. By the mid 1980s, with Australian literature courses flourishing abroad as well as at home, this crisis had passed, but Barnes’s introductory essay and his selection secured the reputation that Lawson’s work had gradually achieved since Vincent Buckley had wondered in 1972 if Lawson was slipping permanently out of critical consideration.

For different reasons, it is necessary to have a contemporary and cosmopolitan voice like Kinsella’s add its momentum to this celebration of Lawson as a classic of our literature and of the genre. Kinsella’s very personal style is both moving and endearing, placing Lawson – that lonely, haunted and besieged artist – in yet another illuminating and evocative context. ‘Back when I was a drinker,’ Kinsella concludes, ‘I said and did some terrible things. I wouldn’t like to be judged by them. Whatever Lawson’s sins in action or viewpoint, his great stories speak beyond them. There are many Lawsons – from left-wing to right-wing, from feminist-sympathetic to misogynist, from racist to some-one who believed in a humanity without race or creed. And in his stories he is most often another Lawson again.’