A few months before I left Australia I got a letter from the bush
signed “Miles Franklin”, saying that the writer had written a novel,
but knew nothing of editors and publishers, and asking me to read and
advise. Something about the letter, which was written in a strong
original hand, attracted me, so I sent for the MS., and one dull
afternoon I started to read it. I hadn’t read three pages when I saw
what you will no doubt see at once—that the story had been written by a
girl. And as I went on I saw that the work was Australian—born of the
bush. I don’t know about the girlishly emotional parts of the book—I
leave that to girl readers to judge; but the descriptions of bush life
and scenery came startlingly, painfully real to me, and I know that, as
far as they are concerned, the book is true to Australia—the truest I
ever read.
I wrote to Miles Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl. I saw
her before leaving Sydney. She is just a little bush girl, barely
twenty-one yet, and has scarcely ever been out of the bush in her life.
She has lived her book, and I feel proud of it for the sake of the
country I came from, where people toil and bake and suffer and are
kind; where every second sun-burnt bushman is a sympathetic humorist,
with the sadness of the bush deep in his eyes and a brave grin for the
worst of times, and where every third bushman is a poet, with a big
heart that keeps his pockets empty.
HENRY LAWSON
England, April 1901