Louisa Lawson’s cottage, Renwick Street

Life at the cottage was frugal but productive. She had her desk, books, a 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 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 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 Lawson’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 for all the water from Marrickville Valley and emptied into Cooks River at what is now Mackey Park—an area that was identified in 1896 as the part that ‘suffers most from the flooding’. Floods in Marrickville could be vast, spreading from Enmore 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 lined it with iron sheeting. If Louisa was living in the cottage in the 1890s, she would have been continually flooded; NSW had entered a wet climate cycle and floods in Marrickville happened almost every year. Like many others, Louisa seems to have fled and moved elsewhere, living at several other addresses.

In 1900 the Marrickville Drainage Scheme was begun—a complex undertaking by the NSW government to drain the valley. As part of the scheme, the Eastern Stormwater Channel was built beside Louisa’s cottage to take water to the Cooks River and was completed by 1902. It was during this time that Louisa bought the cottage.

There were many people in Marrickville—including engineers, aldermen and possibly Louisa herself who were confident that flooding had been fixed by the drainage scheme. Engineering had created an illusion of security that it was perfectly safe to live on Gumbramorra Swamp, but when it overflowed – as it continued to do – there was little doubt Louisa’s cottage was inundated. That happened in 1913 and again in 1917.

The books and papers she kept in the cottage were very likely destroyed, and with it all the fragile records of her writing life.