It’s the birthday of short story writer and poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922), one of the best known Australian authors of the colonial period and sometimes called “Australia’s poet of the people.” Lawson had a hardscrabble life that has appealed to many Australians, who live, as is well known, in a place where everything tries to kill you.

Lawson was born near Grenville, New South Wales, Australia; his parents were Peter Lawson, a former Norwegian sailor, and Louisa Albury Lawson, one of Australia’s earliest feminists. The family was poor and Peter traveled extensively to find work. An ear infection left Lawson partially deaf at the age of nine and fully deaf by fourteen; he was an outsider, bullied by children at school who—let’s just say it—were horrible people. Lawson thus learned to observe rather than participate, which formed him as a poet.

By 1883, Louisa had had it and moved to Sydney to run a boarding house; Lawson eventually joined her there and helped with her political and journalistic causes, and his first story, “His Father’s Mate,” was published in the Bulletin in 1888. The next year he began writing for The Albany Observer and other papers, including—I am not making this up—the Brisbane Boomerang, a radical paper and not, as its name suggests, a puzzle magazine for children. For several years Lawson wrote and also wandered, experiencing the harsh realities of life in the bush and writing about it in a way that captured what it means to be Australian.

Lawson married Bertha Bredt in 1896, had two children with her, took the family to England in 1900, and did some of his finest writing there. But various difficulties drove the family back to Australia, including the English weather, which was so dismal that they preferred to return to the land of the deadly box jellyfish, the eastern brown snake, the saltwater crocodile, and the funnel web spider. So think about that.

Lawson’s marriage tanked and he began drinking, spent several years in and out of prison for drinking and debt, and eventually ended up in mental hospitals and sanitoriums. (Still, it was cheerier than England.) Upon his death at the age of 55, the Australian government gave him a state funeral—the first they’d ever given for a writer.

Lawson published many collections of poems and stories, including In the Days When the World was Wide and Other Verses (1896), On the Track and over the Sliprails (1900), and Children of the Bush (1902), but you might consider starting with Henry Lawson Treasury or The Penguin Henry Lawson Short Stories, easily found on Amazon.

Have a splendid Monday entirely devoid of saltwater crocodiles, funnel web spiders, and dreary English drizzles and stay scrupulously honest to the data.