SOURCE: "Lawson's Joe Wilson: A Skeleton Novel," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3, June, 1964, pp. 147-54.

In the essay below, Wallace-Crabbe examines the themes of "Joe Wilson's Courtship, " "Brighten's Sister-in-law, " '"Water Them Geraniums,'" and "A Double Buggy at Lahey's Creek," asserting that the four stories are "the nearest Lawson ever came to transcending the bounds of his unassertive short story form and writing something in which he could look at human relations more substantially, more expansively. "

Henry Lawson remains unquestionably our greatest short story writer. Indeed he is one of our greatest prose writers, a man whose achievement stands there in the Prose Works, square and solid and unmistakable. At the same time, we cannot pretend not to notice his limitations, which are considerable: to put it simply, Lawson worked within a very limited range in terms of form, of emotional variety, of the kinds of...