I have started work on an album (now finished here) of Henry Lawson poems set to music, focusing on Henry’s songs of rebellion. Henry was the eldest son of a Norwegian miner, born in Grenfell in outback New South Wales on 17 June 1867. While Henry’s mother, Louisa, was an intellectual that mostly likely gave Henry his early exposure to books, she came from poverty and married young.

One of the poems I have recorded is a comparison between the well-to-do Macleay Street and the ‘Red Light’ district of Red Rock Lane in Sydney. My recording of the poem here.

The poem first appeared The Bulletin in January 1907, on page 40.

After his young wife filed for divorce on the grounds of mistreatment and abandonment in 1903, Henry was often in Jail or Prison as a result of drunkenness and failure to pay child support. It is likely that this poem, and the stories in the related book ‘The Rising of the Court’ published in 1914, are at least somewhat autobiographical.

I read The Rising of the Court because I couldn’t find any references to a real Red Rock Lane in Sydney, while Macleay street is still a real place. Henry suggests that one in every four houses on Red Rock Lane is a brothel. There are a few candidate places that were known to host brothels around Darlinghurst in Sydney.

The rise of the two famous female underworld figures, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, had not yet happened when Lawson wrote this poem, though they do seem likely candidates for the One-Eyed Kate, and Cock-Eyed Sal rival roles in the short story.

At some point during the course of the assumed protagonist’s stay in the jail, an un-named girl starts singing a snippet from the American hymn ‘Jesus of Nazareth Passeth By’, written by Emma Frances Riggs Campbell around 1864. In a touching vignette, the woman who had been previously swearing like a sailor sings the responding chorus to the hymn.

Was Jane Johnson a real name? There certainly was a person of that name fined by Central for indecent behaviour in 1892. How did Henry come to hear this hymn and include it in his story? It seems to have been picked up by American revivalists when they toured England in the 1870s, but it isn’t clear how it came to Australia, or at least found its way into Henry’s mind.

The take-away from the Macleay Street poem, for me, is that Henry would rather venture with the souls of Red Rock Lane because of their kindness, and this sentiment is reflected in the way that he writes of the Red Rock Lane folks in the jail and before the judge.