City Bushman: Henry Lawson and the Australian Imagination (Christopher Lee, Curtin University Books, $29.95 tpb, ISBN 1920731709, November)

Christopher Lee tackles Henry Lawson’s image and memory in Australia, how they were developed and have continued to develop over time as different communities have attempted to lay claim to or to discredit the memory of one of Australia’s best-known bush poets. Lee ranges over the time from Lawson’s death to the late 20th century, using Lawson’s memory as a prism through which to view segments of Australian social, political and cultural history. From the political wrangling over his funeral to Lawson’s modern adoption by communities in country New South Wales as a tourist drawcard, his memory has been shaped and reshaped to suit a variety of purposes. Lee’s topic is an interesting one, particularly for readers of Australian literature and history, however, I found the text fairly heavy going. Curtin University Books does not publish traditional academic titles, but ones that have been ‘massaged’ to make them accessible to a general reading population. In this case, perhaps too much of the ‘academic-speak’ has been left in to render this a truly generally accessible text. A book for those readers whose taste tends towards the academic.

Eliza Metcalfe is AB&P’s editorial coordinator

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker