A few months before I left Australia I got a letter from the bush
signed Miles Franklin, saying that the writer had written a novel,
but knew nothing of editors and publishers, and asking me to read
and advise. Something about the letter, which was written in a
strong original hand, attracted me, so I sent for the MS., and one
dull afternoon I started to read it. I hadn't read three pages when
I saw what you will no doubt see at once that the story had been
written by a girl. And as I went on I saw that the work was
Australian born of the bush. I don't know about the girlishly
emotional parts of the book I leave that to girl readers to judge;
but the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly,
painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are
concerned, the book is true to Australia - the truest I ever read.
I wrote to Miles Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl. I
saw her before leaving Sydney. She is just a little bush girl,
barely twenty-one yet, and has scarcely ever been out of the bush
in her life. She has lived her book, and I feel proud of it for the
sake of the country I came from, where people toil and bake and
suffer and are kind; where every second sun-burnt bushman is a
sympathetic humorist, with the sadness of the bush deep in his eyes
and a brave grin for the worst of times, and where every third
bushman is a poet, with a big heart that keeps his pockets empty.
Henry Lawson England, April 1901
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