SOURCE: A review of While the Billy Boils, in Henry Lawson Criticism: 1894-1971, edited by Colin Roderick, Angus and Robertson, 1972, pp. 55-8.

The Decline of Henry Lawson:

The remaining twenty years of Lawson's life were a dismal anticlimax to the promise of his youth, and throw little light on the body of work for which he is now remembered. If he had died, say in 1898, there is little of his important work that we would have lost, and we would have had the satisfaction of lamenting a great writer cut down in his prime. "At thirty," A. G. Stephens remarked, "he had worked out his alluvial field of youth: his mind lost vigor," and Lawson himself admits that "I had lost the thunder, both far and near, the almighty sympathy, the splendid crudity and the sledgehammer force of simplicity of that lonely boy's song". Indeed, while the fragment...