In 1892, Lawson walked from Bourke to Hungerford and back and it was during this time that he came to be very conscious of the hardships of bush life. Also in 1892, Lawson met up with Banjo Patterson, another famous Australian writer, to debate their views of life in the bush.
Lawson also worked as a shearer and lived with the other workers. He
travelled to New Zealand and stayed for seven months where he also worked as a shearer.
Offered a position with the Worker, Lawson returned to Sydney. When the
Worker reverted to a weekly newspaper, he became first a provincial editor
and then a contributor. In 1894 his first collection was published and
Lawson met Bertha Bredt who became his wife in 1896. Lawson and Bertha had
two children, their son Jim, was born 10 February 1898 and baby Bertha in
1899. They travelled again to New Zealand where both Lawson and Bertha worked
as school teachers at a Maori school at Mangamaunu near Kaikoura in the
South Island. After his return from New Zealand in 1898 Lawson struggled
with alcoholism. Lawson published two more prose collections but was
becoming more disenchanted with Australia and in 1900 the family travelled
to England. Lawson continued to write some of his best work in England but
by 1902 decided to return to Australia because of financial problems and
illness.
After his return from England on 21 May 1902 Lawson and his wife separated
and Lawson became increasingly unstable.
Between 1905 and 1910 Lawson was regularly in prison for non-payment of
maintenance and inebriation. He was also in mental and rehabilitation
sanatoriums and gradually progressed into a pathetic, dissolute, alcoholic
wandering the Sydney streets begging for money for alcohol. His friends, J.
Le Gay Brereton, E.J. Brady and George Robertson, came to his rescue and
helped him financially.
Mrs Isabel Byers, who was twenty years older than
Lawson, befriended him and constantly provided shelter and food for him from
1904. In 1916 his friends found him a position at Leeton, providing data
for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. Lawson continued to produce his works
during the First World War and was well received. On 14 July 1921 Lawson
had a stroke but continued to write about his travels to London. On
September 2 1922 at age 55 Lawson died peacefully in his sleep while
still writing and was given a State funeral on 4 September the first writer
to be given one. Henry Lawson remains one of Australia's most famous writers
and his portrait is on our ten dollar note.
A monument to Lawson, which is now shaded by a sugar gum tree planted by his
daughter Bertha, is located in Grenfell.
During Henry Lawson’s life, he wrote poems about Grenfell:
Said Grenfell to my spirit,
"You’ve been writing very free
Of the charms of other places, and you don’t remember me.
You have claimed another native place and think it’s Nature’s law,
Since you never paid a visit to a town you never saw:
So you sing of Mudgee Mountains, willowed stream and grassy flat:
But I put a charm upon you and you won’t get over that.
"Oh said Grenfell to
my spirit, "Though you write of breezy peaks,
Golden Gullies, wattle sidings, and the pools in she-oak creeks,
Of the place your kin were born in and the childhood that you knew,
And your father’s distant Norway (though it has some claim on you),
Though you sing of dear old Mudgee and the home on Pipeclay Flat,
You were born on Grenfell goldfield – and you can’t get over that."