Since Then - Analysis

A reunion that hurts because it should have been easy

Lawson’s central claim is quietly brutal: mateship can be real and still fail under the slow pressure of unequal luck. The poem begins with an almost affectionate roll-call—Jack Ellis my old mate—and the shared history of carrying swags To the Never-Again, Out Back. But that warm naming is immediately undercut by the refrain-like admission that they’ve walked different tracks since then. The tone is not accusatory; it’s resigned, even tenderly fatalistic: there’s little to blame or praise. That phrase keeps returning like a moral shrug, yet it also sounds like a defense against guilt.

Clean collar, torn boots: the shame of being the lucky one

The poem’s sharpest emotional twist is that the speaker is the one who feels diminished—not by poverty, but by comfort. Jack’s battered hat, green coat, and boots with toes...through should invite pity, yet Lawson makes the speaker recoil from his own neatness: It was I felt mean; he wishes his collar were not so clean. That’s a particular, domestic detail—collar, not conscience—that captures how class difference shows up on the body first. Jack’s poverty isn’t romanticized; it’s stated plainly. But the speaker’s new clothes don’t feel like success so much as betrayal, because they mark him as someone who can now pass as a holiday swell, a visitor to a life he used to inhabit.

Why Jack almost walks past

The most painful moment is small: Jack made as though he would pass me by because he thinks the speaker might forget. The speaker’s question—Why have we no faith in each other?—is less about memory than about dignity. Jack’s pride is protective; he would rather avoid a humiliating greeting than risk being treated like a ghost from someone else’s rough youth. The speaker insists Jack ought to have known me better, and then the poem surges into shared ordeal: sweltering scrub, blazing flat, hell-born western drought. These aren’t decorative landscapes; they’re the receipts of intimacy, proof that they once depended on each other in conditions harsh enough to burn social distinctions away.

The past as a bond—and as a standard they can’t meet now

Lawson deepens the bond with specific memories: shanty sprees, rum and tobacco and grub, and the grim comedy of oracles working for survival. Even the love triangle is handled as a shared wound—each was stabbed to the heart by the girl who loved us both—suggesting they once suffered on equal terms. The most sacred memory, though, is the near-death on the lignum plain, the mulga tank, and Jack’s voice—Bear up, old man!—as he literally keeps the speaker alive. That rescue becomes an unpayable debt. It raises the standard of what their friendship meant: not drinks and jokes, but sticking with your mate when life seemed finished.

Polished bar, distant hand: the moment the poem turns cold

After the ellipsis, the poem returns to town and the tone tightens. Jack takes the speaker’s hand in a distant way, and suddenly they are like men who only exchange Good-day, as if the past never happened. The setting matters: the polished bar is a surface built for casual friendliness, but it reflects their difference instead of smoothing it over. The speaker tries to make present and past combine, but the days between won’t vanish. Their clothing becomes a mutual accusation—he couldn’t but notice mine—and Jack refuses another drink: he wouldn’t fill up again. That refusal reads as pride, but also as self-preservation: he will not accept generosity that quietly reorders them into benefactor and beneficiary.

A wish for fairness that can’t undo what happened

The ending doesn’t resolve the relationship; it widens the social frame. When Jack disappears into the crowded street, the everyday noise—rattle of buses, scrape of feet—turns suddenly loud, as if the city itself is complicit in drowning out old loyalties. The speaker’s final wish is political in feeling but personal in origin: that boys might start with equal chances so no old chum ends up more or less than his mate. It’s a modest utopianism—no grand revolution, just fairness at the starting line—but it’s haunted by the knowledge that for Jack and the speaker, the damage is already done.

What if the truest loyalty is the one they can’t perform anymore?

The poem’s hardest tension is that the speaker genuinely honors Jack—he remembers the drought, the tank, the voice in the shade—yet in the present he can’t stop seeing the clothes he wore. And Jack, who once stuck to his mate without question, now protects himself with distance and refusal. Lawson seems to suggest that mateship is not only tested by danger in the bush, but by safety in town—by the humiliations and hierarchies that arrive when survival is no longer the shared task.