Louisa Lawson’s cottage, Renwick Street

Life at the cottage was frugal but productive. She had her desk, books, sewing machine and according to one visitor, her printing press. Louisa printed two of her own books of verse at the cottage: Dert and Do and The Lonely Crossing as well as Henry Lawson’s first book of verse. She kept a large garden, cultivated an orchard of fruit trees and grew honeysuckle, stocks and Australian native flowers. Forthright and outspoken, Louisa captivated visitors with inside stories of The Dawn. For at least some of the time her son, Charles Lawson, lived with her at Renwick Street while another son, Peter, lived close by in Bridge Street Tempe with his family. Her nine grandchildren were only a short walk away.

When her eldest son, the writer and poet Henry Lawson, was locked in Darlinghurst gaol, he described her cottage to a friend. He needed bail money and hoped Louisa would help:

You might even go to my mother. She has plenty. Her address is Mrs. Lawson, ‘Old Stone House’ Tempe (near Railway Station) . . . Her property is near the railway gates. She’d tell you of some friends anyway. It is real gaol this time, you know, and the loneliness is terrible . . . Yours in Trouble, Henry Lawson.

Louisa’s biographers have been puzzled that although she had such a rich writing life so few of her papers have survived. The answer probably lies with the site of her cottage.

Louisa lived only a few metres from Gumbramorra Creek. The creek was the funnel all the water from Marrickville Valley and emptied into Cook’s River at what is now Mackey Park – an area that was identified in the 1890’s as the part that ‘suffers most from the flooding’. Floods in Marrickville could be vast, spreading from Tramvale to Cooks River and while the problems in Tramvale were well known, flooding in the Warren received little publicity.

By the time Louisa came to live in Marrickville, Gumbramorra Creek had been re-routed and straightened to follow alongside Carrington Road. The work was done by Marrickville Council in 1887, which later lined it with iron sheeting. While it was intended to improve the creek and relieve flooding upstream, it did little. The flow of water in the creek was altered again by the drainage scheme in 1903, but when it overflowed – as it continued to do – there was little doubt Louisa’s cottage was flooded. In the floods of 1897, a newspaper reported that a woman on Renwick Street refused to leave her cottage even when the water was a metre deep—and perhaps that was Louisa.

Any of her books, papers and the fragile records of her writing life that she kept in the cottage were probably destroyed.