If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?
If I had the chance to meet a historical figure—even for only a couple of minutes—I would choose Henry Lawson.
Not because he is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, though he is. Not because his poetry captures the hard, unvarnished truth of the bush while Banjo Paterson offered its romance. And not because his life—marked by brilliance, hardship, alcoholism, mental illness, poverty, even prison—holds the kind of complexity that makes for good biography.
I would choose Lawson for a far more personal reason.
When I was a child, my grandfather would sometimes tell me that we were related to Henry Lawson. He never said how, and he died before I was old enough to ask the questions that matter. Later, when my father began exploring our family history, we found threads that seemed to lead in his direction: my great-great-grandmother Elsie, born in Gulgong in the 1880s to a young single mother, father unnamed; Lawson visiting Gulgong around the same time; gaps and silences in the records that leave just enough room for possibility.
There are hints, suggestions, family sayings, incomplete documents—pieces that gesture toward a connection without ever confirming it. We’ve tried to follow the obvious lines and the less obvious ones. Some end abruptly. Others remain open but uncertain.
So if I had only two minutes with Henry Lawson, I wouldn’t ask him about literature, or the bush, or the making of Australian identity.
I would ask him one thing: “Are we related?”
Just that.
A simple question, but one that has lived quietly in my family for generations. Two minutes might be all the time in the world if it meant finally hearing the answer my grandfather never got to share.
The Afterword 
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