SOURCE: "'The Loaded Dog': A Celebration," in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, October, 1983, pp. 152-61.

[In the following essay, Stewart examines two chief characteristics of Lawson 's fiction, "human gregariousness " and "the hardness of things. "]

The Loaded Dog inhabits the background of millions of Australian minds, where he jostles amiably and vitally amongst the stiffer corpses and tutored shades of Bell Birds, My Country and Gallant Cook sailing from Albion. There is nothing dutiful, however, about the way the dog lingers in our minds. He is approved. He remains voluntarily, neither as an official and required patriotic cliché of the olden times, like the land of sweeping plains, nor as a drilled and tinkling set piece, like 'Bell Birds', learnt by rote without a meaning. In a central and formative position in Australian popular literary culture, the Loaded Dog grins and slobbers and wags his tail with the inerasable certainty of a figure in a nursery rhyme.

In spite of its popularity, the story has received little attention from commentators. Lawson's critics, I suspect, have assumed that a straightforward legendary yarn written within a recognizable tradition does not require discussion. There is also the possibility that a popular, 'happy' story that lacks characteristic Lawsonian sombreness has been held necessarily to lack seriousness. To put the work aside and unexamined on these grounds is hazardous. The comic simplicity and folk acceptance of popular writing is often inseparable from its accessible human seriousness: the appeal of the story itself courts explanation. I believe that a discussion of its meaning, artistry and cultural significance can help us to appreciate the significance of Lawson's comic celebration of a dream, and that the context of Lawson's fiction itself best establishes the concepts that give meaning to the comic world of 'The Loaded Dog'. The two central and inseparable preoccupations in his stories that are most helpful, and which I shall need to define in my own way, are 'human gregariousness' and 'the hardness of things', my labels for what are frequently accepted as quintessentially Lawsonian themes.

Lawson's emphasis on gregariousness is obvious and elusive: obvious, because we attest to it in every story about loneliness, isolation, mateship, neighbourliness, the masculine bush ethos, love, husband and wife, madness, the bush itself as humans experience it; potentially elusive, because we may so easily fail to perceive that he alone among authors of recognised stature writes of little else: this instinct and need within the human species, its potential and limitations, the forms it may take and the effects of its repression, are virtually his exclusive subject, determining action and plot, or passivity and plotlessness, and the complexity of his narrative tone, as well as defining the area in which his insight into human behaviour and human nature operates. It is possible for characters to live by themselves in Furphy's fiction, for example, without becoming mad, or eccentric, or intolerably deprived; and if, like Tom Collins, the loner may be judged as rather fussy, pedantic and self-deluding—then, such is life. Such isn 't life for Lawson: the gregarious impulse, in his view of the nature of things, is dominant and paramount; the loner is to be perceived as a curious individual, like Mr Smellingscheck, whose mystique and mystery derive from the fact that he is not gregarious. The isolate in Lawson is eccentric; or mad; or sulky, sullen and selfish; or intolerably deprived. The salvation of the Bush Undertaker, and of the swagman 'Rats', is that they create their own gregarious reality from illusion. The Drover's Wife is an archetypal image of maternal isolation and loneliness—intolerably deprived. The urgency and extensiveness of Lawson's preoccupation with the gregarious impulse is artistically valid (his art validates it) but it is almost exclusive: nobody climbs Mount Everest, or experiences an epiphany or invents the wheel, or is 'justified' through romantic love or religious experience, or occupies himself in any way satisfactorily, unless it be gregariously; and the author's values and priorities adjust themselves to this perspective on human lives.

Lawson's subject, then, is the instinct of human beings for human company and contact: to huddle, to be, and to interact, preferably warmly, with others of the species. His first person narrators are 'insiders'. They write critically, ambivalently and loyally from inside the group, accommodating themselves to the bullies and big kids, like Barcoo Rot and One Eyed Bogan; the innocuously stupid, like Tom Hall; and the hard cases, like Mitchell. The relationship of the narrator to the group establishes the paradox of conformity as a theme or problematic element within many of the stories, (for example, 'Lord Douglas', 'The Union Buries Its Dead', and 'Telling Mrs Baker'), but gregarious solidarity must win, or at least continue. In 'The Union Buries Its Dead' it is not the loner's death that is disturbing; it is Lawson's evocation of the fear that a man, or all men, could be cut off from the human race, unredeemed by the gregarious impulse, locked without recognition within the individual self. His Union is a huddle of schoolboys; the verandah of the Bourke Imperial is like the quadrangle of a segregated boys' secondary school. Although the characters in these settings are not 'types', they are realised psychologically only to the extent that social rituals and the breaking of them permit and define. They are real people whom the reader gets to know socially, but not intimately; and their mores and routines, the unwritten rules for gregarious behaviour, are, as Hal Porter would write, 'equally of air and of iron'. From time to time a fight breaks out in the quadrangle; and occasionally, as in 'That Pretty Girl in the Army', a strange foreign creature called a girl wanders into alien precincts, and you have to patronise her delicately and watch your language. The exclusiveness of Lawson's preoccupation with the lights and shades of human gregariousness provides a context for discussing the Loaded Dog—he is the gregarious impulse incarnate, canonised and canine-ised.

Lawson's second pervasive assumption is 'the hardness of things'. The most universal practice amongst sane people in his fiction is overt worry, in the manner of Joe Wilson, or the suppression of outward concern, as with Mitchell. His celebrated 'realism' is flecked with constant emotional regret: external reality is not his subject—the narrator's emotional response, his voice, is the subject. The difference between Lawson's 'Ah, well' and Furphy's 'Such is Life', or rather his many 'Such is Life's, is that Lawson's expresses a direct emotional avowal, whereas Furphy's characters offer a more cerebral diversity of clinching observations in the face of the variety and enigma of life itself. 'Ah, well' expresses felt resignation: it is a kind of sad moan. The contrast with 'Such is Life' is illustrated inadvertently by Manning Clark in Volume IV of A History of Australia:

Ned Kelly walked to his death in the Old Melbourne Gaol in the morning of 11 November 1880. His mother had urged him to die like a Kelly. Some said he looked frightened and morose and only managed to utter a lame 'Ah well, I suppose it has come to this'. Others said he summed it all up in that sardonic Australian remark 'Such is Life'.

Lawson's positives, then, charity, neighbourliness, even madness, toughness and shrewdness, are really the valued arms of strugglers against the hardness of things. Lawson never states despair: he intones something grim. Even 'It didn't matter much—nothing does' is a fluctuation of the voice, rather than a considered conclusion; and it is a voice which is not so much meditating, as actually expressing the moment's reaction to a continuing burden. There is an undefined or lost ideal behind Lawson's writing: it is life without the hardness of things; it is the relief of that pressure which creates his narrator's burdened tone.

That Lawson, unlike Furphy and Baynton, implicitly uses such an ideal as a gauge of the quality of reality is illustrated by his attacks on the romanticism and optimism of other Australian writers. These attacks in fact indicate his self-delusion, because they illustrate his romantic longing:

They put in shining rivers and grassy plains, and western hills, and dawn and morn, and forest boles of gigantic in fact, which is not and never was in bush scenery or language; and the more the drought bakes them the more inspired they become. Perhaps they unconsciously see the bush as it should be, and their literature is the result of craving for the ideal.

The angry bitterness is revealing. It is as though Lawson would really like to 'put in shining rivers and grassy plains' but the truth prevents him, and makes him angry with those who do. In the phrase 'they unconsciously see the bush as it should be', he gives himself away, by implying that the bush 'should be' an Arcadian dream world. Clearly, and ironically, Lawson's literature is equally 'the result of a craving for the ideal' of the optimists he attacks, albeit in conjunction with his constant emotional rediscovery that the world is not ideal. 'Oh, may the grass grow green and tall'. In Tom Collins' ridicule of Geoffry Hamlyn and other romantic novels, by way of contrast, we find no 'craving for the ideal' and total scorn of Kingsley's literary concoction, which Tom would never want as a substitute for bush life. The irony in Furphy's superior implication that life may be more romance-like than Tom perceives does not alter the fact that neither Collins nor Furphy endorses a romantic literary projection, or even dreams of 'the' ideal.

Lawson's fascination with ideal and real, and with illusion and reality, triggers the creative impulse behind several of his best known stories. It leads him to examine perspectives on a seeming innocence or state of grace, a condition in which the Hardness of Things dissolves or loses its oppressiveness, and in which altruism and generosity are unsullied by hard experience, and may work as an agent of good. These stories, however, work to conclude that the Hardness of Things itself explains or modifies any initial, magical appearance of innocence or grace, and reduces it to the status of very unmagical experience. 'That's the way of it', comments Donald McDonald at the end of 'That Pretty Girl in the Army', 'with a woman it's love or religion; with a man it's love or the devil'. That Pretty Girl, whose initial mystique is of altruism, beauty and spiritual quality, so far from transcending the Hardness of Things through some unusual bestowed grace or inherent innocence or goodness, is eventually to be perceived as simply the product and the victim of this ordinary hardness in life: apparent innocence becomes an explicable delusion. Mrs Baker, too, must remain deluded: the hardness of things is too hard for her to be told. The Giraffe, to whom we have begun to respond for his innocence and natural generosity, is as close as Lawson gets to sainthood. But in Lawson's world, where there are many martyrs and no saints, the Giraffe has to start saving his money, and is despatched on the train to marriage, which in Lawson is virtually a synonym for Paradise Lost. "I wish I could immortalize him!', writes the narrator, longing for the ideal, but thereby confirming that he cannot. The Giraffe has never really changed hard-bitten humanity; it has changed him.

The innocent and gregarious potential of the carefully named Bob Brothers, incidentally, is given a non-human referent. 'The Giraffe' is not merely a nickname to designate our awkward lanky appearance. The name becomes associated with naive, gangling, yet noble, taller than life generosity: he is, in this setting, an exotic legendary beast, to immortalise—if that were possible. In 'The Loaded Dog' the device is used in reverse: the dog is gauche, stupid, blundering, generous, gregarious and innocent; and the dog is a mate, with a human name, 'Tommy'. And he is 'immortalised'.

'The Loaded Dog' inverts or softens Lawson's characteristic hard reality: the weight of the Hardness of Things is taken from the narrator's shoulders. As such, it is Lawson's most thorough-going bestowal of grace upon a superficially recognisable reality—the comic celebration of a dream. The Dog is idealised Mateship. Innocent, gregarious, happy, loyal and unworried, he is accordingly the unwitting instrument of the forces of good in a triumph over those adversaries of mateship, selfishness, greed and solitary bastardry. And because he is ideal, he is allowed only to be a dog. He is briefly let off the chain in a holiday world where the grim work-a-day forces of the Hardness of Things are replaced on their regular melancholy rounds by a literary Providence, who rewards gregariousness and goodness of heart and punishes bastards. No worries. Those slender-witted, virgin-souled schoolboys Andy, Dave and Jim experience literary alarm, but never a real care; and the Ideal, the Dog, is incapable of anxiety. The story is therefore more than simply farce or slapstick. It is what happens to Lawson's imagination when he discards his characteristic assumptions. It is not reality, but its yardstick is reality. As a bush yarn that works within the traditional frame of reference of comic romance it is an archetypal, speculative and, certainly, serious story; and its seriousness is fully definable only within the wider context of Lawson's complete prose fiction.

From the Drover's Dog to Kerr's cur and the apparently innocent dingo of Ayer's Rock, dogs are legendary mates or bastards in Australian bush culture. Lawson's bush is a prodigious literary kennel. Although his dogs are not invariably man's best friend, and his kangaroo dogs are emphatically repugnant and untrustworthy, most dogs in Lawson are the gregarious adjunct and loyal companion, the mate, of their owners. The indefatigable 'Alligator' is courageous and loyal; the practical 'Five Bob', though perhaps not the full quid, is a devoted gravedigger's labourer; and that unfortunate poodle who is the victim of an ungracious tonsorial operation in 'The Shearing of the Cook's Dog' is so much his owner's mirror image that the cook is 'narked for three days' not by the indignity of the act, but because 'they'll think me a flash man in Bourke' with the dog 'trimmed up like that'. Both versions of the morose 'That there dog of mine' exploit the received wisdom that the dog is man's close and faithful friend: in the original version, in which the dog eats his dead master, this sentiment is the source of the nihilistic grotesquerie; in the revised version, it is a means of endorsing and illustrating mateship. The moral of 'Two Dogs and a Fence' is that men, like dogs, will quarrel stupidly over a barrier, 'yet if those same two dogs were to meet casually outside they might get chummy at once, and be the best of friends, and swear everlasting mateship, and take each other home'. Lawson's dogs, then, are only human, but more so; and sometimes ideally so. The Loaded Dog is gregarious innocence, the epitome of idealised Mateship; and his skulking adversary is brooding, selfish, stand-offish bastardry.

The story begins quietly and deliberately, with two pages of down to earth detail concerning the technology of cartridge making and fishing. Lawson's method is not only to establish an authentic if somewhat idyllic calm before the explosion, but also to allow the tale gradually to forge and validate its own folk significance: it works slowly at first towards the genre of the apocryphal story and heightened folk yarn, from an initial immersion in genial pedestrian actuality:

They used the old-fashioned blasting-powder and time fuse. They'd make a sausage or cartridge of blasting powder in a skin of strong calico or canvas, the mouth sewn and bound round the end of the fuse; they'd dip the cartridge in mellow tallow to make it water-tight, get the drill-hole as dry as possible, drop in the cartridge with some dry dust, and wad and ram with stiff clay and broken brick . . .

The narrator here is confirming his bush credentials. The reader is to assent to this practical mystique, to nod approvingly at the bushmen's and the narrator's know-how, and to perceive the wisdom and rituals of the ethos, 'as bushmen do'.

It is not until after the introduction of the dog that the story transcends the pleasantly mundane. Then the vitality of the imagery, the apocryphal exaggerations of the yarn, the slapstick conventions, and the ritualised posturing towards the reader, establish a 'do you remember the time' quality which is confirmed by the concluding lines:

And most of this is why, for years afterwards, lanky, easy going bushmen, riding lazily past Dave's camp, would cry, in a lazy drawl and with just a hint of the nasal twang:

'Ello, Da-a-ve! How's the fishin' gettin' on, Da-a-ve?'

That is Lawson's cheerful but certain reminder to the reader that the teller of a tale is licensed to blur reality with the shine of myth: the reader should not necessarily believe that the land of once-upon-a-time is a real place.

Lawson's use of the apocryphal yarn, and of anecdote as a literary device, is diverse and uneven. At his worst his stories are straitjacketed by the boring conventions of tall tale garrulity which have lingered into Frank Hardy's Billy Borker yarns and into the futile maundering that still passes for humour on some radio programmes. The original version of 'Rats', in which in a final sentence we learn that the little old man is yarning in the pub about 'the way which he had "had" three "blanky fellers" for some tucker and "half a caser" by pretending to be "Barmey'" is inferior to the final version because, as Brian Kiernan has pointed out [in Henry Lawson,] 'the disturbing implications of the sketch are lost in the factitiously well made story version'—or, to extend the point, the reader feels that he has been 'had' by the author, since the subtleties of the reader's uncertainty and disturbance are reduced to the engineered certainty and bar-room bravado of a conventional yarn.

In other stories, and in various ways, Lawson deflates the apocryphal and romantic elements of the recollected yarn: 'Send Round the Hat' and 'The Chinaman's Ghost' are examples. In 'The Bush Undertaker' he demythologises a conventional apocryphal yarn, not by suggesting that it is spurious, but actually by confirming that the ordinary ingredients of a seemingly far-fetched tale constitute a grotesquely credible heightened reality: its 'truth' may not be exactly literal, but neither is it apocryphal. Lawson uses certain elements of the yarn to affirm that the story is not a yarn.

In 'The Loaded Dog' we work towards the avowedly apocryphal, but from the beginning we respond to glimmerings of idyll:

Dave Regan, Jim Bentley and Andy Page were sinking a shaft at Stoney Creek in search of a rich gold quartz reef which was supposed to exist in the vicinity. There is always a rich reef supposed to exist in the vicinity: the only questions are whether it is ten feet or hundreds beneath the surface, and in which direction.

Although the narrator is rather cynical about this golden dream, a holiday quest for El Dorado, his tone is indulgent. We are not in work-a-day reality, for the mates have gone fishing as well as gold-seeking; and fishing is a traditional literary escape, from Izaac Walton to Huck Finn. Moreover, Lawson's not-so-good earth has suddenly become extravagantly bountiful:

There was plenty of fish in the creek, fresh-water bream, cod, cat-fish and tailers. The party were fond of fish, and Andy and Dave of fishing.

The creek is neither in flood nor in a dry, hard bed; and the weather seems uncharacteristically clement.

The cartridge is a 'formidable bomb'. The emphasis on its destructive potential is unstinting,—indeed, Dave has engineered an elaborate device 'to increase the force of the explosion'. To argue, therefore, that Lawson even here tinges his bush humour with the constant threat of crude violence and destruction is understandable; but I do not believe that we are invited to respond to the threat of the cartridge except insofar as it is primarily a familiar comic clowning device, the equivalent of the double bunger of the later Tom and Jerry animated cartoon. Although there is some sadism within the convention itself, appropriate to the 'sadistic' bush tradition that countless stories and cartoons in the Bulletin of the period unpleasantly exploit, it is remarkable that this element has been greatly softened in comparison with other examples in the Bulletin, and has been transformed in context from 'realistic' sadistic humour into a distanced, almost comic cartoon stylisation. As we are to discover, the Providence of Lawson's comedy, unlike the Fates of his reality, will use the destructive power of the cartridge to achieve a poetic justice and a happy retributive ending. The dog itself makes a belated grande entrance:

They had a big black young retriever dog—or rather an overgrown pup, a big, foolish, four-footed mate, who was always slobbering round them and lashing their legs with his heavy tail that swung round like a stockwhip. Most of his head was usually a red, idiotic, slobbering grin of appreciation of his own silliness. He seemed to take life, the world, his two-legged mates, and his own instinct as a huge joke.

The impression is immediate, exaggerated, almost Dickensian, and unforgettable: the sudden juxtaposition of this colourful caricature against the genial pedestrian rituals of pragmatic bush technology confirms the dog's status as the larger than life subject of the yarn. He is not only a mate; he is a gangling, gauche, madly friendly, stupidly generous mate—a caricature of his own masters, and a satirical but delighted idealisation of bush gregariousness. This description together with the action that follows emphasises the vitality of the forces the dog embodies, the reversal of the usual Lawsonian passivity.

The dog is proper instinct, graced by a freedom from all worry and malice; and in his innocence he is necessarily stupid, the archetypal saint and fool, an ideal who cannot be killed off by the immense and random destructiveness of the cartridge. A bush dog, he grins 'sardonically'; 'they loved him for his goodheartedness'; life for him is 'a huge joke': the seeds of the moral allegory are sown, and germinate within the farcical action—all his goodhearted, game-playing, fun loving, faithful, gregarious responses actually cause the slapstick.

As in an animated cartoon, which the technique anticipates, a series of poses and attitudes make up a set of ritualised 'frames': Dave and Andy running in divergent directions; Jim shinnying up a sapling; the 'big pup' laying the cartridge 'as carefully as a kitten' at the foot of the tree; the sputtering fuse; Jim hiding in a hole; the dog grinning 'sardonically down at him, as if he thought it would be a good lark to drop the cartridge down on Jim'. Farcical action is pictorialized. The technique may derive from pantomime stage tradition and circus clowning; and from the black and white pen drawing which helped to popularise the Bulletin. It is hard to think of examples before Lawson which better exploit it through the medium of the written word.

Providence in the shape of a benevolent Lawson has the retriever arrive at the natural home of mates and bushmen, the pub, where he goes 'in under the kitchen, amongst the piles': a plausible, Hades-like moral setting in which to find the sworn enemy of mateship and gregariousness, the troll of the Bush, ensconced in selfish solitary brooding. This particular bête noire is a chien jaun, a nameless, 'vicious, yellow mongrel cattle dog' . . . 'sulking and nursing his nastiness under there'. He sounds like the kind of person Lawson finds distasteful, a canine Barcoo Rot, 'A sneaking, fighting thieving canine, whom neighbours had tried for years' to put down.

At this stage a mock-epic assemblage of the clan or pack, a sort of grand dog Union, gathers at the pub, and to the fray:

Nearly a dozen other dogs came from round all the corners and under the buildings—spidery, thievish, cold-blooded kangaroo dogs, mongrel sheep and cattle dogs, vicious black and yellow dogs—that skip after you in the dark, nip your heels, and vanish without explaining—and yapping, yelping small fry. They kept at a respectable distance round the nasty yellow dog, for it was dangerous to go near him when he thought he had found something which might be good for a dog or cat.

Lawson's dogs here are scruffy, unheroic witnesses, as are his unionists in other contexts; the 'one-eyed cattle dog' of this company is perhaps a counterpart of 'One-Eyed Bogan'. The parallel, however, is no more than a suggestion: the essential, and literally redeeming, characteristic of the dogs is that they stick together, gregariously. They are an audience within an audience to be viewed by the drinkers at the pub; both audiences will be viewed by the reader. The dogs, as the story's inner circle, will be required to engage in the ritual witnessing of the central providential purgation of evil and restitution of right. We are told that they are to remember this cautionary epic ritual all their lives.

He sniffed at the cartridge twice, and was just taking a third cautious sniff when—It was very good blasting powder—a new brand that Dave had recently got up from Sydney; and the cartridge had been excellently well made. Andy was very patient and painstaking in all he did, and nearly as handy as the average sailor, with needles, twine, canvas, and rope.

The 'big bang' is narrated with a comedian's timing, but the amusing ironical understatement of 'it was very good blasting powder . . .', protracted within a return to the prosaics of Dave's and Andy's practical credentials, anticipates carefully the sensationally juxtaposed apocryphal exaggeration which insists on the incredible 'folk' status of the yarn:

Bushmen say that the kitchen jumped off its piles and on again. When the smoke and dust cleared away. . . .

What is happening is that Lawson is insinuating into the narrative the rules and terms by which the Loaded Dog is to remain in our minds: he is to be remembered as legend, as the hero of a happy bush instance in which the hardness of things is overcome and destroyed, in which gregariousness actually triumphs and endures in the imagination. The dogs disperse to go home, to seek their ancestral birthplaces, to remember the lesson and nurse their cautionary wounds; but laughter is restored to all ordinary decent humanity, in hyperbolic quantities of segregated squawks, hysterics and shrieks.

Life resumes with this grand cautionary memory, and with universal good cheer, gregariously established; and the dog will finally be put back on the chain. But the triumph of Mateship incarnate, of the Loaded Dog as total gregariousness with Providence on its side, of myth as a lingering armament against the workaday reality which must be returned to, is celebrated by the ritual of his final victorious appearance before the reading audience:

And the dog that had done it all, 'Tommy', the great, idiotic mongrel retriever, came slobbering round Dave and lashing his legs with his tail, and trotted home after him, smiling his broadest, longest and reddest smile of amiability.

That 'The Loaded Dog' has become Australia's greatest bush nursery yarn is not only the serious compliment it deserves; it is also the enduring evidence that Lawson's literary instructions and gestures within the story, which require that it assume that kind of status as a popular yarn, have been heeded with an authenticating delight and affection.