Henry Goes Bush (Wayne Marshall, Picador)

Wayne Marshall blends fact and fiction (including time travel) to explore alternative versions of Henry Lawson’s 1892 trip to Bourke. Lawson was 25, depressed, nearly deaf and already battling alcoholism when the Bulletin sent him west to gain firsthand experience of the bush. While Banjo Paterson’s romantic view of the bush saw the rugged bushman as the archetypal Australian, Lawson saw only the unrelenting misery of settler life. The magazine famously staged a poetry slam between the two – but Marshall asks: What if it had been more than a war of words? What if it became a fight to the death, a fictional battle for the bush between Lawson, the tortured and struggling writer representing the working man, and Banjo, recast as a cool, well-educated lawman and pastoralist’s darling? Marshall’s freewheeling approach allows him to roam through fact, rumour and speculation surrounding Lawson’s journey. Was his fragility rooted in family dysfunction? Was he a delusional drunk when he wrote in support of the nascent labour movement? And was poet Jim Grahame a friend or something more? Suspense and momentum build as Marshall layers one chaotic episode upon another, ultimately presenting the central enigma of Lawson: a writer who enjoyed fantastic success yet died broke, drunk and alone. Or did he? Exhilaratingly inventive, Henry Goes Bush stretches the boundaries of historical fiction in ways that feel entirely its own.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Katy Briggs is a marketer with a degree in English and history. She is an avid reader across myriad genres. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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