This September marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Henry Lawson (1867-1922), one of Australia’s best-known poets and short story writers.
Most people associate Lawson with the bush through works such as The Drover’s Wife (1892) and While the Billy Boils (1896). However, Lawson also wrote about city life, both in Sydney and North Sydney. Lawson lived in and visited North Sydney many times between 1885 and 1921. He was never in one place for long, residing at various addresses in Lord, Miller, Charles, William, and Euroka Streets.
Although not amongst the most well-known of his works, Lawson’s North Sydney poems and stories are some of the most intimate depictions of a Sydney harbour-side community ever written. Writer and historian Olive Lawson, Henry’s great niece, compiled his writings on the local area in Henry Lawson’s North Sydney (North Shore Historical Society, 1999).
Lawson’s time in North Sydney coincided with great change. The local population grew from just over 12,000 in 1886 to 48,000 in 1920. His poem Old North Sydney (c.1910) gives a real sense of community and loss in the face of development that many welcomed as progress:
‘…A brand new crowd is thronging
The brand new streets aglow
Where the Spirit of North Sydney
Would gossip long ago.
They will not know to-morrow –
Tho’ ‘twere but yesterday –
Exactly how McMahon’s Point
And its Ferry used to lay…’
The ferry Lawson referred to started operating in 1884 with an all-night service between Circular Quay and the North Shore. From 1906, Sydney Ferries ran services at 15-minute intervals and every 10 minutes at peak hour. Whilst Milsons Point was by far the busiest of North Sydney’s wharves, the McMahons Point and Lavender Bay service was a popular route, with over 6,000,000 passenger trips each year before the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Although three of Lawson’s Euroka Street homes were demolished to make way for the North Shore rail line, enough of Euroka and nearby Bank Streets survives to give an impression of the place in his day.
What has long-since gone are the sights and sounds of the old working-class neighbourhood, evoked in the 1915 poem Kiddies’ Land:
‘…Our Street is an asphalted street,
And, when the school-day’s done,
You hear the sounds of little feet,
And little go-carts run…’
These were the children of ‘Harbour people’, those who lived and worked on or beside the waterway, in its boatyards and ferry depots, timber yards and gas works. It was with these people in mind that Lawson vented his rage at the anticipated destruction of Balls Head – ‘The only spot of cliff and bush / That Harbour people know’.
In The Sacrifice of Ball’s Head (1916), Lawson protested against the leasing of part of the foreshore to a coal bunkering company. It is one of the earliest expressions of a conservation ethic and the needs of a community in Australia. The Balls Head Coal Loader was built despite Lawson’s objections, though the remaining part of the headland was preserved as a public reserve. The poet lived to see the former completed but died before his brother-in-law, Premier Jack Lang, dedicated the latter in 1926. It might have brought him some consolation.
Visit Stanton Library, in person or online, to discover more of Henry Lawson’s North Sydney.