Cirrus@Austlit

'Henry Lawson is the great goanna lurking in the dark and sometimes drab bush of Australian literature. He is the man with the moustache who made his way onto the ten dollar note and he was also the first Australian writer to be given a state funeral. It was Lawson who conducted the debate with Banjo Paterson and he has always been seen as the opposite number and complement of the author of “The Man from Snowy River” and “Clancy of the Overflow”. It’s not as simple as the fact that Paterson wrote verse of remarkable buoyancy that lodged itself in the national memory and Lawson wrote prose. Nor that they debated about the bush. Lawson also wrote verse – some of it memorable enough in its way – but that their visions epitomised the opposite poles of a comprehensive vision of Australia (or at any rate a mythology) which The Bulletin in its early vastly influential days was doing its best to articulate, in the 1890s, in that period of nationalistic self-scrutiny and self-dramatisation that would have its culmination politically in Federation and the creation of the Australian nation.' (Introduction)