'In April 1901, three months after the Commonwealth of Australia had come into existence, Henry Lawson was sitting in London writing a preface to My Brilliant Career, the first novel of his young protegee Miles Franklin: “I saw that the work was Australian – born of the bush . . . the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly, painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned, the book is true to Australia – the truest I ever read.” Lawson had been in London since June 1900. He doesn’t appear to have been much interested in the formal trappings and arrangements of Federation, in spite of the ardent nationalist and republican sentiment that runs through all his writing.' (Introduction)