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Loneliness and trade IV, from ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’1899

by Henry Lawson

An unpublished manuscript in bound volume from the Angus & Robertson archives.

Henry Lawson was born in a tent at Grenfell, NSW, on 17 June 1867. The eldest of four children, he moved with his family around the NSW goldfields during his early years. As his father, Niels, followed the gold rushes, his mother, Louisa, often needed help from her children to run the family farm. Henry received only three years of formal education, with much of his learning gained through private study and reading. The shy Lawson was bullied at school — an ear infection as a boy had left him partially deaf, and by 14 he had lost much of his hearing. Lawson would later write that his deafness ‘was to cloud my whole life, to drive me into myself, and to be, in great measure responsible
for my writing’.