HENRY LAWSON'S WOMANISH WAIL.

LAWSON, Henry, 1867-1922; SCHAFFER, Kay

The article describes the formulation of the Henry Lawson author function (Foucault) and its placement, through cultural discourse, at the centre of the Australian Myth as established by Kay Schaffer in her seminal study Women and the Bush. Building on this contention, Christopher Lee ascertains that public discourse in the past century has formulated Lawson as an object epitomising the values of this Myth. Through them, Lawson is positioned as the main empowering element of the local rubric, which demands the right of the local to articulate the local (Lee, 2004). Consequently, Lawson came to signify (white, colonial) Australia. Within this process of formulating his “author-function” Lawson's stories were established as the paramount contribution to the construction of the Myth. However, since each piece of literature necessarily “gets away” from its author, points of divergence from the Myth in Lawson's work are identified and described. It is our contention that Lawson's greatness is revealed precisely in those points of departure from the Myth, which constitutes the most important aporia of Australian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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