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A Wife's Heart

The Untold Story of Bertha and Henry Lawson

University of Queensland Press

I slip into the salt water, my goggles clinging to my eyes. Sunbathing backpackers languish on daybeds along the pool's edge, the glass fence framing their burning bodies. Out on the harbour, divided from the pool by a timber boardwalk, Riviera speedboats cruise by, splashing Sydney's wealth.

Lingering at the end of the pool, I move aside as another swimmer strokes to a stop. He stands up and peers at the sky.

'This might ruin our day,' he says. Another storm is moving in. But it seems too early in the season for snap storms.

* * *

The storm keeps its distance but it shades Henry Lawson's statue, his most prominent memorial. Wet from the swim, and for once not in a hurry, I stop to scrutinise him.

Henry has weathered the summers well since he was unveiled in 1931. Sculpted in bronze by George Lambert, he stands atop a plinth of sandstone, with those big, sensitive eyes looking out over the Royal Botanic Garden and The Domain. The Henry Lawson Literary Society protested that the sculpture's location was too hidden away, arguing upon visiting the site that it was 'one of the very nooks the poet would have revelled in for contemplation and the writing of a set of verse, but certainly not the place for his monument; it is too unfrequented, too suggestive of obscurity'.

At a preview of the plaster model, held at Lambert's studio, this Henry was described by critics as 'an imposing piece of sculpture in larger than life size', and a 'remarkable likeness'. Lambert had first modelled Henry's head on that of Jim, the poet's son, who'd sat for the sculptor to help create the memorial to his father. The dog was modelled on a hound from a local rescue home. But then, prior to the showing in his Sydney studio, Lambert had replaced the first plaster head because it had fallen off overnight, onto the studio floor. Henry was as fragile in the art made in his honour as he was in life.

Perhaps the Lawson society were right in saying that the statue is hidden away. Since I've read Bertha's affidavit, Henry looks more shadowy than ever.

Henry's hand seems to form around an invisible mug, perhaps of billy tea, or more likely a beer. At the unveiling, however, the Memorial Fund's chairperson said Lambert wanted to capture Henry's mannerism: 'Lawson's hand was not raised in gesticulation whilst reciting, but "so as to see a distant hill or as if to recall far horizons of memory" – a familiar gesture of the poet's.'

Still looks like he wants a beer. The Bulletin cartoonist David Low apparently wanted Lawson's line, 'Beer makes you feel as you ought to feel without beer', as the statue's inscription. At the end of the path is Mrs Macquarie's Chair, where Henry Lawson and Bertha Bredt took their first stroll together late in 1895. The ironies of Henry's statue multiply here in The Domain, where he stands today as Bertha wanted then – a figure of stability. If only Henry had been like his statue in life. But then Bertha wouldn't have been seduced by his poetry, by his literary beauty, by seeing herself as his muse, which her critics suggest she thought she was.

Once you become the wife, you are associated with domesticity rather than divine inspiration. Then come the divorce, the demands, the need. The lack.

* * *

On Christmas Day my daughter's father, Dan, posts on Facebook from LA airport. For 13-year-old Ruby, Facebook is also a father-positioning system. A jazz pianist, he is a five-star gypsy, working on luxury cruise ships that take him a hemisphere away. When Ruby was little, she tried to follow him on a world map on her wall until it was a mass of scribbles curling at the corners.

We've spent the days leading up to Christmas with Ruby's aunt, Mariana, who recently split from her husband. Our friendship has endured my divorce from her twin brother five years ago, even though such convulsions usually result in divorce from the ex's family as well. She has a white cottage near the beach, into which she's squeezed her four children after moving out from a waterfront mansion. By Boxing Day, they and Ruby are in a sunburnt slump around the Xbox in the living room. Outside, plastic strings of Christmas lights hang in the sun. Despite the post-Christmas mess, the cottage has a feminine feel, and a resoluteness. Artworks that Mariana's husband disliked are now hung around the house.

She stacks the dishwasher with listless intent. 'I'm tired,' she says. 'I live on a shoestring. The credit card's gone. It's hard doing everything – looking after the kids, the house – and working as well.'

He's paying child support and at least she had some savings when they separated. She is managing to pay the rent, so she knows it could be worse. But it's still such a shock.

* * *

When I go back to town Ruby stays on with her cousins at the beach for the following week. Even though she is a teenager now, when she is away the quietness is unsettling. Sometimes I still panic – have I forgotten to pick her up? She is an ever present responsibility in my thoughts, if not in my presence. When she was little, a boyfriend once told me unthinkingly: 'She is a burden on you.'

'She is my child,' I snapped.

Imagine Bertha, as a new single mother, having a similar response. She is in my thoughts now too. On the day the affidavit was lodged in the Divorce Court, Friday 3 April 1903, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on a drought relief concert, and that the Women's Social and Political League had met, and that a suspected attempted wife murderer who had cut his own throat had survived.

History is what you are told, what you remember and what you learn. Once I'd been told, in an offhand conversation with a literary friend, that Henry did not (or could not, as his supporters defend) pay regular child support – from that day on, Henry was no longer a long-ago poet to me. He was a father to children. He was a husband. There was a wife, who was clearly bringing up the children with little help.

I keep wondering, how did Bertha live as a separated, single mother in the early 20th century, when women had barely won the vote? Did the Divorce Court support her? Or Henry?

Henry was cruel, Bertha alleged.

An habitual drunkard. Blacked my eye. Endangered me.

The questions keep doing laps in my head.

Included in a letter from Henry Lawson to Bertha Bredt at her home at McNamara's Bookshop, 5 March 1896:

After All

The brooding ghosts of Australian night have gone from
  the bush and town;
My spirit revives in the morning breeze, though it died
  when the sun went down;
The river is high and the stream is strong, and the grass is
  green and tall,
And I fain would think that this world of ours is a good
  world after all.

The light of passion in dreamy eyes, and a page of truth
  well read,
The glorious thrill in a heart grown cold of the spirit
  I thought was dead,
A song that goes to a comrade's heart, and a tear of pride
  let fall –
And my soul is strong! and the world to me is a grand
  world after all!

Let our enemies go by their old dull tracks, and theirs be
  the fault or shame
(The man is bitter against the world who has only himself
  to blame);
Let the darkest side of the past be dark, and only the good
  recall;
For I must believe that the world, my dear, is a kind world
  after all.

It well may be that I saw too plain, and it may be I was blind;
But I'll keep my face to the dawning light, though the devil
  may stand behind!
Though the devil may stand behind my back, I'll not see
  his shadow fall,
But read the signs in the morning stars of a good world
  after all.

Rest, for your eyes are weary, girl – you have driven the
  worst away –
The ghost of the man that I might have been is gone from
  my heart to-day;
We'll live for life and the best it brings till our twilight
  shadows fall;
My heart grows brave, and the world, my girl, is a good
  world after all.

* * *

My copy of Bertha's memoir, My Henry Lawson, has a watermarked cover and the spine is flaking; yet somehow, like a bad marriage, it stays together. The fragile pages give her account of Henry's early life with his mother, the feminist Louisa Lawson, and his father, Peter, on a parched property in New South Wales. Peter panned for glints of gold and Louisa tried to turn the land into a farm, only to feel more fenced in by the restrictions of rural life. Foreseeing a future of drought-blighted drudgery, Louisa instead took their youngest son, Peter, and daughter, Gertrude, to Sydney. The elder Henry soon followed.

In late 1895 he met Bertha near her stepfather's bohemian bookshop, McNamara's, which smelt of beer and onions. She said she wavered and resisted Henry at first. He'd been about to go to New Zealand; feeling deflated by her refusal, he decided to go off as he'd planned. But then, according to Bertha, no sooner had he docked in New Zealand than he caught a ship back.

She wrote, 'He pleaded with me to be married right away. I refused. Next morning, I received his poem, "After All" and a letter ...' However, there was still Mrs McNamara to convince. Bertha's younger sister, Hilda, 17, was already dating Jack Lang and now here was Henry, 28, eyeing Bertha, only 19. Mothers are suspicious of gypsies, writers and artists; Mrs McNamara may have been the 'Mother of the Labor Movement', and a bohemian herself, but the politics of marriage suitability were quite different.

In 'Memories', Bertha's contribution to the anthology Henry Lawson by His Mates, she recalled:

After we had known each other for about six weeks we became engaged. But my dear little mother did not approve of the match nor did other members of my family. Harry was very deaf and delicate. He had no worldly goods – nothing but his literary genius – and there were obstacles. But we did not heed these, being sure that together we could overcome everything.

When I told my father a century later that I was marrying a musician, he said, 'Does he have an earring? Who will look after you?' Looking back at the photos of our wedding, I see a slightly stunned girl in a white dress, and a husband who, like the photos, has faded away.

* * *

Henry is part of the city. He is a sudden appearance during a stroll. Walking from the city through the gardens, you can exit through the Henry Lawson Gate to get to Mrs Macquarie's Chair and the harbourside pool. A postcard featuring a drawing of Henry Lawson's headstone on the cliff top at Waverley Cemetery is on a stand at Bondi. On a bushwalk around Berry's Bay a verse from his poem 'Kerosene Bay' is inscribed in the concrete. A lady says loudly on her mobile phone, 'I didn't know you were up here! I'm going to tell my sister, who lives right down in Henry Lawson Drive.'

He keeps turning up. In Canberra a gold cast of his long, emaciated writing hand, as sculpted by his friend Nelson Illingworth, is in a glass-encased display at the National Library of Australia. There's an annual Henry Lawson Festival in Grenfell, where he was born. Before Gallipoli, he was the poet who created mateship. The Dickens of the bush. He's been mythologised, anthologised and analysed.

Bertha has been forgotten. Filed away in boxes of letters, birthday cards and notes.

* * *

Ghost signs remain on the streets. A leather-goods shop sign is bleached into brick on a Castlereagh Street wall. Further along, at number 221, is the site of McNamara's bohemian bookshop, the default living room for writers, politicians and intellectuals, including one lanky poet, Henry Lawson, and a future state premier, Jack Lang. Where once communist posters hung in the demolished bookshop, the Bank of Sydney now displays its interest rates in its windows, which are painted a plain steel- grey. Scaffolding covers the nearby corner where Bertha said she first met Henry, as he loped down the street on his way to the bookshop. She told Ruth Park that she was impressed by his 'big marvellous eyes' that were a 'deep brown'. She called them 'the most wonderful eyes I've seen', and spoke of Henry's 'soft voice' and 'quiet smile'.

Writing about Bertha in her memoir Fishing in the Styx, Park asked Henry's friend, New Zealand journalist Tom Mills: 'Why did Henry fall for Bertha?'

'Oh,' he said decisively, 'it was the shape that caught Henry.'

D'Arcy, when he heard, laughed. 'Sounds like a music-hall song!' But it was true that even at seventy-five or -six small round Bertha had an hour-glass shape, probably with the aid of corsets.

Henry, a corseted Bertha and her escort, the bookshop's assistant Karl Lindgrist, made their way to Mrs Macquarie's Chair, where Lindgrist left them alone. He must have felt miffed at Henry weaving between the shapely Bertha and him; Bertha told Park that Karl was also keen on her shape.

More than a century later, I walk through the Botanic Garden to the Chair, and wonder if the bats shat on Henry and Bertha too. There has been a campaign to move the bats on as they are destroying the old trees, but they cling to the branches above.

* * *

Along the Circular Quay boardwalk a plaque is dedicated to Henry's confidant, Dame Mary Gilmore. She said she knew the truth about Henry and Bertha, providing an alternative narrative of the romance. Whom to believe?

The Dame argued:

Last week (1922) Frank McGrath of the old Edinburgh Hotel – in those days the writers' rendez-vous – said, speaking voluntarily: 'And by Jove! don't I remember his marriage! She chased him till she got him! She never let him alone till she caught him ... She threatened to commit suicide or something, and said her father was going to turn her out into the streets if he wouldn't marry her!' It was what Henry himself told me once in a broken-hearted moment when his wife had been particularly cruel to him.

Ruth Park and D'Arcy Niland were friends with both Mary and Bertha in their later lives. Comparing the two women in her memoir, Park observed: 'We both found Bertha very likeable. She was durable, humorous and kindly. My impression was that, when young, she had probably been a voluptuous little bundle. Still she gave off that indefinable fragrance that attracts men.'

Henry's publisher, George Robertson, upon learning of the engagement, told his personal assistant, Rebecca Wiley:

She had great big hazel eyes, and shining with excitement; they were undoubtedly very much in love with each other ... but ... I knew Henry even then was a confirmed drinker; had at times a very nasty temper, and all the other things that go to make a genius very difficult to live with.

He foresaw 'nothing but tragedy in it for both of them'.

Robertson was so concerned, he pulled Bertha aside:

I spent a whole morning pleading with her not to take this irrevocable step. I told her I had three little girls of my own, and I'd rather see them dead, than to marry a temperamental genius, who was a drunkard as well. It was all in vain, she knew she could keep him straight, love would do it, and so on.

Henry's mother, Louisa, sided with the worried publisher and with Bertha's mother. 'The woman who cannot give a better reason for marrying than that she is in love, is likely to come to grief. It is not that she loves, but why or what she loves, that is the all important question,' she warned prophetically in 'Unhappy Love Matches', published in her feminist paper, The Dawn, in 1889.

Who really knows? Perhaps their daughter, who was christened Bertha Louisa after her mother and grandmother, but nicknamed Barta by Henry. Her unpublished notes about her parents nestle among other Lawson family folders in the Mitchell Library:

It is certain she [Mother] and Dad did love each other ... They were young and full of hope. They were eager for the future ... But it was he who saw the situation that might lie before them both – not Mother, headstrong, eager, impetuous, wanting nothing to stand in her way. Dad saw it. J Le Gay [Brereton] told me that he came to him for help. He was so worried. He loved her. He wanted to marry her. He was afraid. If he couldn't depend on himself, what would happen? Calamity for him but most of all for her. He had more than half made up his mind to get out of Sydney and go back to the bush. He did not know what to do. J Le Gay told me, he said: 'Look Henry, I've known you to do silly things, but I've never known you to run away before.' Dad thanked him and went off ... Dad saw very clearly, even when he could not help himself, in the tragic hopelessness of his own situation, to do anything about it.

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Excerpted from A Wife's Heart by Kerrie Davies. Copyright © 2017 Kerrie Davies. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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