I notice some twenty-year anniversaries being cited as 2007 touches the half-way mark. Twenty years ago, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate, President Ronald Regan memorably invited "General Secretary Gorbachev to tear down this wall!" In the same month, in Britain, his bosom buddy, Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, won her third successive election. And a week or so later Teddy Seymour cruised into the harbour at Frederiksted, St Croix, to become the first black man to officially circumnavigate the world.
Meanwhile, though curiously unremarked upon by local or international media, my friends, Rick Hosking, Syd Harrex and I set out from Adelaide to drive to Newcastle where we would attend a special gathering of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. ASAL, as it was known (the founders having abandoned attempts to denote its national reach because the acronym would have been on the nose) was running a three-day conference to mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Henry Lawson (born 17 June 1867).
We would meet up with other scholarly mates on the way — Peter Pierce, Rob Gerster, Bruce Bennett and Barry Andrews — in Wellington, New South Wales. Since none of us had ever been to Wellington, we agreed to meet at the nearest pub to the TAB. This arrangement worked perfectly and, after a lunch at the pub and a flutter at the TAB, we set off to do some touring in the ‘Lawson country’ before heading for Newcastle.
I was agonising my way through the final months of writing a book about Louisa Lawson — Henry’s mother — so I was keen to see Eurunderee, where the Lawsons had lived for several years, and Guntawang, where Louisa was born on ‘Hungry’ Rouse’s station in February 1848.
Eurunderee was easy. A spare, ivy-wrapped monument marked the spot on that “old hilly corner” and the symmetry of vineyards had mostly replaced the drought-blasted paddocks that Louisa finally abandoned in 1883. But Guntawang was a different matter. Our two-car convoy nudged its tentative way through the network of tracks — at least so they were twenty years ago — in the country of Ratscastle Creek, Slasher’s Flat, Two Mile Flat and Guntawang. Yet somehow it was hard to feel confident that we were approaching any kind of actual settlement.
"There are signs that lead you on [I later wrote]. You turn this way and that between the long, taut