His Country-After All

"His Country—After All" by Henry Lawson is a collection of short stories and writings that reflect the rugged life and spirit of the Australian landscape and its people. Lawson, a foundational figure in Australian literature, captures the struggles, joys, and complexities of rural life, often highlighting themes of identity, belonging, and resilience. Through vivid imagery and poignant storytelling, he paints a compelling portrait of the Australian bush and its inhabitants, making it a significant work for understanding the cultural and social fabric of Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• Short story

								
The Blenheim coach was descending into the valley of the Avetere
River--pronounced Aveterry--from the saddle of Taylor's Pass. Across
the river to the right, the grey slopes and flats stretched away to
the distant sea from a range of tussock hills. There was no native bush
there; but there were several groves of imported timber standing wide
apart---sentinel-like--seeming lonely and striking in their isolation.

“Grand country, New Zealand, eh?” said a stout man with a brown face,
grey beard, and grey eyes, who sat between the driver and another
passenger on the box.

“You don't call this grand country!” exclaimed the other passenger, who
claimed to be, and looked like, a commercial traveller, and might have
been a professional spieler--quite possibly both. “Why, it's about the
poorest country in New Zealand! You ought to see some of the country in
the North Island--Wairarapa and Napier districts, round about Pahiatua.
I call this damn poor country.”

“Well, I reckon you wouldn't, if you'd ever been in Australia--back in
New South Wales. The people here don't seem to know what a grand country
they've got. You say this is the worst, eh? Well, this would make an
Australian cockatoo's mouth water-the worst of New Zealand would.”

“I always thought Australia was all good country,” mused the driver--a
flax-stick. “I always thought--”

“Good country!” exclaimed the man with the grey beard, in a tone of
disgust. “Why, it's only a mongrel desert, except some bits round the
coast. The worst dried-up and God-forsaken country I was ever in.”

There was a silence, thoughtful on the driver's part, and aggressive on
that of the stranger.

“I always thought,” said the driver, reflectively, after the pause--“I
always thought Australia was a good country,” and he placed his foot on
the brake.

They let him think. The coach descended the natural terraces above the
river bank, and pulled up at the pub.

“So you're a native of Australia?” said the bagman to the grey-beard, as
the coach went on again.

“Well, I suppose I am. Anyway, I was born there. That's the main thing
I've got against the darned country.”

“How long did you stay there?”

“Till I got away,” said the stranger. Then, after a think, he added, “I
went away first when I was thirty-five--went to the islands. I swore I'd
never go back to Australia again; but I did. I thought I had a kind of
affection for old Sydney. I knocked about the blasted country for five
or six years, and then I cleared out to 'Frisco. I swore I'd never go
back again, and I never will.”

“But surely you'll take a run over and have a look at old Sydney and
those places, before you go back to America, after getting so near?”

“What the blazes do I want to have a look at the blamed country for?”
 snapped the stranger, who had refreshed considerably. “I've got nothing
to thank Australia for--except getting out of it. It's the best country
to get out of that I was ever in.”

“Oh, well, I only thought you might have had some friends over there,”
 interposed the traveller in an injured tone.

“Friends! That's another reason. I wouldn't go back there for all the
friends and relations since Adam. I had more than quite enough of it
while I was there. The worst and hardest years of my life were spent
in Australia. I might have starved there, and did do it half my time. I
worked harder and got less in my own country in five years than I ever
did in any other in fifteen”--he was getting mixed--“and I've been in
a few since then. No, Australia is the worst country that ever the Lord
had the sense to forget. I mean to stick to the country that stuck to
me, when I was starved out of my own dear native land--and that country
is the United States of America. What's Australia? A big, thirsty,
hungry wilderness, with one or two cities for the convenience of foreign
speculators, and a few collections of humpies, called towns--also for
the convenience of foreign speculators; and populated mostly by mongrel
sheep, and partly by fools, who live like European slaves in the towns,
and like dingoes in the bush--who drivel about 'democracy,' and yet
haven't any more spunk than to graft for a few Cockney dudes that
razzle-dazzle most of the time in Paris. Why, the Australians haven't
even got the grit to claim enough of their own money to throw a few dams
across their watercourses, and so make some of the interior fit to live
in. America's bad enough, but it was never so small as that.... Bah! The
curse of Australia is sheep, and the Australian war cry is Baa!”

“Well, you're the first man I ever heard talk as you've been doing about
his own country,” said the bagman, getting tired and impatient of being
sat on all the time. “'Lives there a man with a soul so dead, who never
said--to--to himself'... I forget the darned thing.”

He tried to remember it. The man whose soul was dead cleared his throat
for action, and the driver--for whom the bagman had shouted twice as
against the stranger's once--took the opportunity to observe that he
always thought a man ought to stick up for his own country.

The stranger ignored him and opened fire on the bagman. He proceeded to
prove that that was all rot--that patriotism was the greatest curse on
earth; that it had been the cause of all war; that it was the false,
ignorant sentiment which moved men to slave, starve, and fight for the
comfort of their sluggish masters; that it was the enemy of universal
brotherhood, the mother of hatred, murder, and slavery, and that the
world would never be any better until the deadly poison, called the
sentiment of patriotism, had been “educated” out of the stomachs of the
people. “Patriotism!” he exclaimed scornfully. “My country! The darned
fools; the country never belonged to them, but to the speculators,
the absentees, land-boomers, swindlers, gangs of thieves--the men the
patriotic fools starve and fight for--their masters. Ba-a!”

The opposition collapsed.

The coach had climbed the terraces on the south side of the river, and
was bowling along on a level stretch of road across the elevated flat.

“What trees are those?” asked the stranger, breaking the aggressive
silence which followed his unpatriotic argument, and pointing to a grove
ahead by the roadside. “They look as if they've been planted there.
There ain't been a forest here surely?”

“Oh, they're some trees the Government imported,” said the bagman, whose
knowledge on the subject was limited. “Our own bush won't grow in this
soil.”

“But it looks as if anything else would--”

Here the stranger sniffed once by accident, and then several times with
interest.

It was a warm morning after rain. He fixed his eyes on those trees.

They didn't look like Australian gums; they tapered to the tops, the
branches were pretty regular, and the boughs hung in shipshape fashion.
There was not the Australian heat to twist the branches and turn the
leaves.

“Why!” exclaimed the stranger, still staring and sniffing hard. “Why,
dang me if they ain't (sniff) Australian gums!”

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