Henry Lawson
Henry Lawson
Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson was an Australian writer and poet. Along with his contemporary Banjo Paterson, Lawson is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period and is often called Australia's "greatest short story writer". He was the son of the poet, publisher and feminist Louisa Lawson...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 June 1867
CityGrenfell, Australia
CountryAustralia
It is a matter of public shame that while we have now commemorated our hundredth anniversary, not one in every ten children attending Public schools throughout the colonies is acquainted with a single historical fact about Australia.
I’ve never seen anyone rehabilitated by punishment.
It is quite time that our children were taught a little more about their country, for shame's sake.
We shall never be understood or respected by the English until we carry our individuality to extremes, and by asserting our independence, become of sufficient consequence in their eyes to merit a closer study than they have hitherto accorded us.
Who says Australia offers not a home for every poor Englishman, or any other countryman that finds his way to our shores? And what sort of thanks do we get for it?
The children are taught more of the meanest state in Europe than of the country they are born and bred in, despite the singularity of its characteristics, the interest of its history, the rapidity of its advance, and the stupendous promise of its future.
On the same line of reasoning, if Australians were to be Australians, or rather if Australians were as separate from any other nation as Australia from any other land, there would be no jealousy between them on England's account.
It is the same with revolution; so long as the proper spirit is spreading amongst our young men, we are satisfied that it spreads without bombast or parade.
The old shepherd had died, or got drunk, or got rats, or got the sack, or a legacy, or got sane, or chucked it, or got lost, or found, or a wife, or had cut his throat, or hanged himself, or got into Parliament or the peerage anyway, anything had happened to him that can happen to an old shepherd or any other man in the bush, and he wasn't there.
In a land where sport is sacred, Where the labourer is God, You must pander to the people, Make a hero of a clod.
Oh, my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low, I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.
Beer makes you feel the way you ought to feel without beer.