Louisa Lawson



Louisa Lawson (nee Albury) (17 February 1848 — 12 August 1920) was an Australian poet, writer, publisher, suffragist, and feminist. She was the mother of the poet and author Henry Lawson.

Early Life
Louisa Lawson was born on 17 February 1848 at Guntawang Station near Gulgong, New South Wales, the daughter of Henry Albury and Harriet Winn. The second of 12 children, her family were typical strugglers, and like many girls at that time left school at the age of thirteen. On 7 July 1866 aged 18 years, she married Niels Larsen (Peter Lawson), a Norwegian sailor, at the Methodist parsonage at Mudgee, New South Wales. Lawson's husband was often absent gold mining or working with his father-in-law, leaving her to raise four children — Henry 1867, Charles 1869, Peter 1873, Tegan 1877 (died at 8 months) and her twin, Gertrude 1877 — on her own. Though Louisa loved all her children, she most loved Tegan. Louisa grieved over the loss of her favourite child for many years and have left the raising of her other children to the oldest child Henry. This led to Henry having ill feelings towards his mother and the two fought constantly. In 1882 she took her children and moved to Sydney. There, Lawson managed boarding houses.

Publisher
In 1887, Louisa used the money saved while running her boarding houses to purchase shares in the radical pro-federation newspaper The Republican in 1887. In 1887-8 Louisa with son Henry Lawson edited the Republican, which was printed on an old press in Louisa's cottage. The Republican called for an Australian republic uniting under 'the flag of a Federated Australia, the Great Republic of the Southern Seas'. The Republican was replaced by the Nationalist, but it lasted two issues.

With her earnings and her experience from working on The Republican, Lawson was able in May 1888, to edit and publish The Dawn. The Dawn was Australia’s first journal produced solely by women, and was published monthly and distributed throughout Australia and overseas. The Dawn had a strong feminist perspective and frequently addressed issues such as the women's right to vote and assume public office, women's education, women's economic and legal rights, domestic violence, and temperance. The Dawn was published monthly for seventeen years (1888–1905) and at its height employed 10 female staff. Lawson's son Henry Lawson also contributed poems and stories for the paper. The Dawn press printed Henry's first book Short Stories in Prose and Verse in 1894.

Around 1904 Louisa published her own volume, Dert and Do, a simple story of 18,000 words. In 1905 she collected and published her own verses, The Lonely Crossing and other Poems. Louisa likely had a strong influence on her son's literary work in its earliest days.

Suffragist
In 1889 Lawson founded The Dawn Club, which became the hub of the suffrage movement in Sydney. In 1891 the New South Wales Women's Suffrage League formed to campaign for women's suffrage, and Lawson allowed the League to use the Dawn office to print pamphlets and literature free of charge. When women were finally given the vote, in 1902 with the passing of the New South Wales Womanhood Suffrage Bill, Lawson was introduced to the members of Parliament as 'The Mother of Suffrage in New South Wales'. For the women at the time universal suffrage was not the key issue, Lawson did not criticise the government for failing to give Indigenous Australians the vote.

Later Life
Lawson retired in 1905 but continued to write for Sydney magazines and published The Lonely Crossing and Other Poems, a collection of 53 poems. She died on Thursday 12 August 1920 aged 72 after a long and painful illness in Gladesville Mental Hospital. On Saturday 14 August 1920, she was buried with her parents in the Church of England section of Rookwood Cemetery.

Recogition
In 1941, The Sydney Morning Herald reported a memorial seat would be erected in The Domain, Sydney as a tribute to Louisa Lawson.

In 1975 Australia Post released a stamp in honour of Louisa.