SOURCE: "Narrative Technique in Lawson," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, May, 1980, pp. 367-73.

In fashioning his short story form Lawson made, as A. A. Phillips has noted in 'The Craftsmanship of Lawson' [in

The Australian Tradition, 1958], considerable technical departures from the primarily narrative aims of the form at the time. Lawson kept the story or narrative element to a minimum but was nevertheless able to create, with great economy, sufficient framework to support his sketches without their becoming shapeless. The chief device of these frameworks is Lawson's narrator, and the diminution of the story element naturally casts the discourse element, the rhetoric of the narrator, into prominence. It will be argued in this essay that contrasts between the story and the narrator's discourse point to a problematic realism and a documentary intention on the narrator's part. Furthermore, the rhetoric of the narrator, particularly that...