Ashes or chocolates? Or both?

Michael Cook

February 13, 2024 3 Reactions

Lawson was no saint. He grew up in the country, failed to enter university, and worked at odd jobs while writing poetry and short stories for magazines.  His marriage ended disastrously, with his wife complaining that he was a drunk who beat her mercilessly. He spent time in jail for petty offences. He hadn't a religious bone in his body; if anything, he was a dreamy socialist. But he was a genius at depicting the nobility of ordinary people in stress and poverty. He was greatly loved and when he died in Sydney, indigent and alcoholic, he was given a state funeral. 

In the first handful of stories in Joe Wilson and his Mates, Lawson describes a few unrelated incidents in his character’s married life. Joe and his wife Mary are dirt poor on their uncultivated plot of land, but she battles to keep the family civilized. The stress of raising children and maintaining a cultivated home life causes them to quarrel, but they remain united by a deep love and loyalty. Lawson probably meant to turn the stories into a novel, but sustained effort was not his strong suit.

The last story to be written, but the first in the sequence, is “Joe Wilson’s Courtship”. It could have been a bit stereotyped and sentimental but it’s rescued by Lawson’s artistry. What made it memorable for me is the narrator’s advice to the reader about living chastity in courting a girl he really loves:

I think that the happiest time in a man’s life is when he’s courting a girl and finds out for sure that she loves him and hasn’t a thought for any one else. Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, and keep them clean, for they’re about the only days when there’s a chance of poetry and beauty coming into this life. Make the best of them and you’ll never regret it the longest day you live. They’re the days that the wife will look back to, anyway, in the brightest of times as well as in the blackest, and there shouldn’t be anything in those days that might hurt her when she looks back. Make the most of your courting days, you young chaps, for they will never come again.

I suppose that this brilliant sketch of how Joe woos Mary is the chocolates and roses of St Valentine’s Day. Ash Wednesday follows quickly in the succeeding short stories. “Brighten’s Sister-In-Law” relates how their son almost dies as a result of a kind of epileptic attack. ‘Water Them Geraniums” and “Past Carin'’’ describe a crisis in the marriage when both Joe and Mary feel that they have been crushed by unremitting hard work; that their lives have been failures.

Somehow they work through it. In the final sketch Joe pulls enough money together to buy a surprise present for Mary -- a double buggy. It ends:

When we were alone Mary climbed into the buggy to try the seat, and made me get up alongside her. We hadn’t had such a comfortable seat for years; but we soon got down, in case any one came by, for we began to feel like a pair of fools up there.

Then we sat, side by side, on the edge of the verandah, and talked more than we’d done for years—and there was a good deal of ‘Do you remember?’ in it—and I think we got to understand each other better that night.

And at last Mary said, ‘Do you know, Joe, why, I feel to-night just—just like I did the day we were married.’ 

And somehow I had that strange, shy sort of feeling too.

Lawson’s message is that romance is just the faltering beginning of married love, which becomes stronger, richer and more devoted with years of mutual sacrifice. "For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part" is a successful formula for happiness. What better message for Valentine’s Day?

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

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