Ernest Hemingway once wrote that ‘all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn’. We might add that Oz Lit owes Twain a little something, too.

Henry Lawson, who was born in 1867 (the same year as Twain’s first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County), was a great admirer of the American and claimed to have read ‘all of Twain’. Chris Holyday makes a strong claim for a meeting between the two in 1895, when Twain was lecturing in Sydney and assembling material for what became Following the Equator. Both men were journalists, fond of a drink. Both were eloquent eulogisers of manly endeavours for which they themselves possessed little competence. And both gladly went ‘roughing it’ in search of adventure, characters and tall tales, which they collected and retold like folk anthologists: translating vernacular speech into prose-poetry, oral tradition into literary art.