Hedley Thomson

‘I’ve spent 35 of my 70 years in Ballarat, having been raised in suburban Melbourne and holidayed and worked on the Mornington Peninsula, where I also met my wife, Christine, and started raising our family of three excellent daughters. My work has been in the fields of land use, environmental, strategic and corporate planning, principally in local government, but also with stints in State, regional, private and community organisations. Throughout my life I’ve had an interest in regional Australia, in theatre – especially performing – and, developing from not much to a near obsession (in all the right ways), in Henry Lawson.

Coming to Ballarat, which I/the family did in 1988, has enabled me to indulge all three interests; e.g.: the Rosebud Memorial Hall was OK for the occasional play but I never counted on a venue as wonderful as Her Majesty’s Theatre, being part of Fred Fargher-directed musicals, and being on stage with my children in ballet performances at Royal South Street Society competitions (I like to demuse people by boasting that I have a ‘first’ in ballet from those comps – as ‘the male’ in a winning troupe).

As far as Henry Lawson is concerned, like many of us growing up, I knew of his well-known pieces such as The Loaded Dog and The Drover’s Wife but little else. I’d scanned through a few selections of his works but – like many people, I think – I found them a bit too serious; ‘Banjo’ Patterson was certainly the more popular writer. Then, in the 1980s, I happened to buy what became the very popular two-volume complete works of Lawson, compiled by Leonard Cronin (I also bought a similar two-volume job of A.B. ‘Banjo’ Patterson’s works that came out around the same time); once I started reading, I was hooked. I discovered he wrote about everything, in almost every possible style, with humour, with pathos, with serious analysis of the topic chosen, with prophetic intent. This clearly was/is no ‘bush poet’. I found – like all great writers – that his truths, his observations, his descriptions of human foibles and failings, the brilliance of his verbal descriptions of the settings of his pieces stand the test of time; that is why I am so infatuated with his work. And that it is of Australia; palpably of this country, including when he writes of our indigenous peoples (with whom he frequently had amicable dealings, despite the views of some commentators).

To find that Lawson visited Ballarat in 1887, following which he wrote a number of pieces about that seminal event in modern Australian history – the Eureka rising, has enabled me to make a connection between my passion for his writings, my place of residence and my long-time involvement with theatre/performance. During 2022 – the 100th anniversary year of Lawson’s death – a trio of us performed various of Lawson’s works to community group audiences. Now the BMI has provided me with the opportunity to focus on Ballarat’s Henry Lawson and to highlight the effect that the young Henry’s visit had on his writings.’