I’m sure you’ve all heard of Henry Lawson. He’s a well known Australian writer and bush poet. Really, there’s no need for me to talk about him more than that. But I was listening to the radio tonight and the guest of the hour was Michelle Scott Tucker. She is engaged in writing a biography of Louisa Lawson, mother of Henry, and well known in her own right at the time. We seem to have mislaid how hard women have worked over the decades and how much they helped in forming the country that we now call Australia*. Tucker has already written a biography about Elizabeth Macarthur and from what I heard on the radio she’s going well with her research about Louisa Lawson.
Louisa had an entreprenurial heart. After leaving her husband in 1882 she moved herself and her four children to Sydney where she ran boarding houses. She saved enough money from that to be able to purchase shares in The Republican newspaper in 1887. In May 1888 she started her own feminist newspaper, The Dawn and carried on writing and publishing it using female staff until 1905.
Louisa also published Henry’s first book in 1894. I mean, if you’ve got a press, and you’ve got a son with some writing talent, why not?
The reason Tucker was speaking on the radio tonight was because there are missing issues of The Dawn. She’d really like to read them all as part of her research, but some of them are missing. Yes, she’s checked Trove. While Trove has every issue listed, when you dive in to reading them some of the issues are missing. Tonight she was talking to David Astle about it and putting out a plea for help. Essentially, if you have any issues of The Dawn, you can make contact with her here.
While listening to the radio I didn’t do the sensible thing and write down Tucker’s name or what she was searching for. Instead I thought about it some minutes later and than googled my way through to her website. One of the things I’ve found is an eBook listed on Project Gutenberg. This book has some lead articles from The Dawn. I’m sure Tucker has seen this and doesn’t need me to point it out to her, I also suspect it’s not really as much help as having the full newspapers. Having said that, I’ve just perused some paragraphs of these lead articles and Lawson seems ahead of her time. She talks about corsets and how you don’t manage to get enough breath when wearing them. In another article she discusses food and that we really need to eat properly.
I’m really pleased I decided to write about Tucker’s search for the missing copies of The Dawn. I’ve read some really good writing from the late 19th century. And I look forward to reading her book, it’s due out in 2027.
*I really didn’t know how to formulate the sentence. I mean, yes, we’re talking about white women. And when we talk about the history of Australia we tend to focus on the whites. Unless we’re focussing on things the Indigenous have done, or things that have been done to the Indigenous, or even things done by immigrants from non-English speaking countries. It’s a problematic sentence and I needed to talk about that a little.
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