Apart from being sordid, the Sydney Swans saga is a rerun of the stalest of stupidities. Alleged sexual assault by …. take your pick: CEOs, 14-year-old private school students, ALF players, NRL players, MPs, radio personalities … A sad conga line of boys and men shuffling through the evening news bulletins who never seem to have learned anything about chastity.
In today’s media, chastity is a four-letter word (I know, I know; I was never good at maths). And until ancient vices are counterbalanced by ancient virtues, we’re unlikely to see a change in the headlines. Young people need inspirational literature to help keep them on the straight and narrow.
There aren’t many writers who have successfully extolled the value of chastity. It’s mentioned, if at all, as a ribald jest or with an ironic sneer. One who succeeded, surprisingly, is Henry Lawson, he of the weatherbeaten mug and humungous moustache.
Lawson is one of Australia’s literary greats. Born in the bush town of Grenfell in 1867, he bounced from job to job and eventually eked out a precarious living writing poetry, sketches and short stories.
His tales of hardscrabble life in the bush and his republican and socialist poems were immensely popular. When he died in 1922, he was given a state funeral, the first distinguished citizen to be so honoured, and one of only two Australian writers.
His poetry is memorable but undistinguished. But some of his short stories are world-class. “The Union Buries its Dead” or “The Drover’s Wife” invite comparisons with Kipling or Hemingway.
His prose is austere but quivering with understated emotion. His descriptions of the bush and the bushman defined the Australian character for generations. His portrait, in profile, was featured on the $10 note from 1966 to 1993.
After that, his reputation began to fade. Perhaps Australia’s changing cultural mix meant that the colonial past was repudiated as Anglophile and unsophisticated. What stands out in Lawson’s work is his compassion. He was the poet of the battler, of struggle street, of the little man, of the underdog.
His writing was deeply humane and, although he was not a believer in the conventional sense of the word, he had a Christian heart. His biographer, Brian Matthews, says that “the peak of his achievement” is four loosely linked stories about Joe Wilson and his wife Mary.
Amazingly, they open with useful advice for the Sydney Swans.
“I think that the happiest time in a man’s life is when he’s courting a girl and finds out for sure that she loves him and hasn’t a thought for any one else,” says Joe.
“Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, and keep them clean, for they’re about the only days when there’s a chance of poetry and beauty coming into this life. Make the best of them and you’ll never regret it the longest day you live.
“They’re the days that the wife will look back to, anyway, in the brightest of times as well as in the blackest, and there shouldn’t be anything in those days that might hurt her when she looks back. Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they will never come again…
“Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they’ve got a lot of influence on your married life afterwards—a lot more than you’d think. Make the best of them, for they’ll never come any more, unless we do our courting over again in another world. If we do, I’ll make the most of mine.”
Lest that sound like Victorian marzipan, the rest of the stories paint a realistic, sometimes tragic, portrait of marriage. Life in the bush was lonely, hard, dangerous, and impoverished. What keeps Joe and Mary going despite the difficulties is deep affection, commitment and love for their child.
Lawson was no starry-eyed innocent. His own marriage was desperately unhappy. His wife eventually obtained a judicial separation, citing drunkenness and domestic violence. A weakness for the bottle destroyed his marriage and then his career.
After 1905 or thereabouts, his creative powers withered. He was jailed a number of times for drunkenness, wife desertion, child desertion, and non-payment of child support. When he died in 1922, though famous, even revered, he was a physical and psychological wreck.
His weaknesses notwithstanding, Lawson respected women and held that old-fashioned four-letter word in great esteem. The AFL ought to make his Joe Wilson stories compulsory reading for players in their upcoming sensitivity training sessions.
