It’s a favour to no-one to call him (certainly never her) ‘a modern Henry Lawson’ – as the back cover of Bruce Pascoe’s collection proclaims – because of the large and difficult questions that are raised. What does the name ‘Henry Lawson’ mean? ‘The Loaded Dog’, or ‘Water Them Geraniums’? The writer of humorous stories about the bush where life is animated by a huge and comic spirit, or of ones about living in the bush that leave you feeling dismayed and chilled to the bone? And who is this epithet aimed at? For some Lawson is the face on the ten-dollar note; for others he’s the successful Australian writer who went to England and failed to make any impression, returned, and then lived long enough to mourn his own decline as a writer, ending his life as a miserable drunk; for still others he’s one of the first writers you read at school.

The point here is that Australian culture is not so homogeneous that the name Lawson can be taken for granted. And what does it mean to call a writer a ‘modern’ Henry Lawson? The idea seems to include some notion of resurrecting the past; perhaps the kind of rewriting of the popular mythology of men and the bush and country life. The trap here is a kind of complacent nostalgia. Murray Bail’s story ‘The Drover’s Wife’, which is as much about Russell Drysdale’s painting as it is about Lawson’s story, is instructive here. Bail’s story is a reading of the painting, and its power comes from the way it unlocks the story hidden in the details of the painting while at the same time telling another side of Lawson’s story. This is a story that deals with disappointment and loss, the soured marriage of the speaker and his wife, the bush and the way it means, to each of the characters. But its carefully sustained and ruthless economy wipes out even the possibility of nostalgia and sentimentality. Some of Pascoe’s stories are set in the bush; most are about men’s lives; some of them tell those lives as heroic struggles; others deal in a kind of pathos that reaches for Frederick McCubbin’s The Bush Burial but, inevitably, leaves the reader short changed because that particular kind of pathos doesn’t really work for anyone anymore.