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Note on Texts

In Lawson's and other letters and manuscripts I have retained the original spelling and punctuation because it is often revealing, and emended only where there might be difficulty in understanding the meaning. Such emendations are indicated by square brackets or footnotes.

In Maori language texts I have followed the advice of Dr P. W. Hohepa. Manuscript idiosyncrasies in word separation and punctuation are not indicated. Otherwise any emendation is indicated by square brackets or footnotes.

For quotations from printed stories or poems I have preferred, when I have been able to locate it, to use the text of the first published version, usually in a journal, rather than the sometimes editorially revised text of a subsequent collected volume. Unfortunately this study was completed too early for more than occasional use to be made of Colin Roderick's edition of Lawson's Collected Verse, vol. i, 1885-1900 (Angus and Robertson, 1967). Some discrepancies between the text as Professor Roderick gives it and that given in this book can be found where I have relied solely on a manuscript or on a single printed version.

References to poems, stories, or essays by Henry Lawson are, wherever possible, to their first published version, but if they have been subsequently collected in either Poetical Works (1925, 3rd ed., 1951) or The Stories of Henry Lawson, ed. Cecil Mann (1964), a second reference is given.