Faces in the Street

Faces in the Street

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by Pip Wilson

Henry Lawson is usually depicted as a bushwhacking swagman, but Australia's most famous writer spent most of his adult life in Sydney and London, mixing with famous radicals and bohemians. His mother Louisa Lawson is almost unknown, but largely because of this complex woman, women worldwide have the vote.

Pip Wilson's big novel explores the world in which they truly lived - a world of radicalism, poverty, love affairs, insanity, criminality, drunkenness, violence, sedition, terrorism, passionate hopes, and friendships with some of Australia's most remarkable people.

Henry's cohabitation with Lizzie Humphrey while in London in 1901 (when Henry's wife was in a psychiatric hospital), was first discovered during the course of Pip's research for this novel.

Faces in the Street contains a glossary of more than 900 words, and brief biographies of more than 230 real people who appear in the novel or are mentioned in it.

586 pages softcover.

View a sample of this book.


"Good stuff - experientially, politically, anecdotally, stylistically, narratively, romantically, alcoholically. What more can one say?"
Douglas Houston, PhD, co-editor of the Oxford Good Fiction Guide

Customer Reviews:

sintch  (Friday, 12 March 2010)
Rating:
This book is just amazing.rnrnMeticulously researched and, as far as I can tell by my own research, factually accurate in every respect I was able to
confirm.rnrnAnd written in such a clever manner that makes history come alive. (speaking from someone who doesn't like the subject much)rnrnYou feel
that you are there with 'Harry' walking the streets of old Sydney town and joining him in the pubs he frequented watching him throw back his 'bishop
barker'.rnrnWhy this book isn't included in our school 'english' (or is it 'literature') classes as part of the curriculum, I don't know.rnrnGive
yourself a treat and go back in time to old Sydney town with 'Harry'.


Cory Heneker  (Wednesday, 26 November 2008)
Rating:
I'm only half-way through this novelisation of the lives of Henry and Louisa, but it's got me sucked in. Whenever I open it, I'm transported to
nineteenth-century Australia: the language, the obvious connections to events occurring in the real(?) world of Australia's (H)istory. The treatment
of Henry's developing alcoholism is insightful and sympathetic - the poet's adventures on the streets and in the pubs of nineteenth-century Sydney
read like Henry Lawson short stories, all strung together to paint the life and times of our most celebrated yet tragic poet. My area of interest -
what got me to this book in the first place - is Louisa's possible connection with Melinda Kendall, mother of Henry Kendall, who was Louisa's
favourite poet. I'm researching the life and writings of Melinda Kendall for my PhD, and I feel there must have been some correspondence between the
two poets' mothers when Louisa began taking subscriptions for the transfer of Henry Kendall's remains at Waverley Cemetery. Melinda was, after all,
still alive when the process began, and as far as I can ascertain, she owned the original plot where her son was first buried (and, I believe, where
Henry Lawson's remains now reside). Melinda Kendall's grave, it may be noted, is right next door. Okay, this novel skims over the events surrounding
the Kendal grave, and it suggests that the process was taken out of Louisa's hands early in the piece. However, I can't help thinking there must have
been some communication between these two great women, and there are documents hidden away somewhere (the archivist at Waverley Cemetery is less than
helpful on the subject). Though I came to the novel hoping to find something for my own research, and didn't, somehow the world of nineteenth-century
literary Australia this book evokes makes that not matter. This is a fair dinkum good read and valuable as a reinforcement of an emerging Australian
identity.

Peter Knox (Research Assistant, AustLit on-line database, University of Queensland).


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