The Last Review - Analysis

A deathbed mind trying to hold two worlds at once

Henry Lawson frames The Last Review as a literal bedside scene: Turn the light down, nurse, Draw the blinds. But the poem’s real action is internal. The speaker is dying, and in that narrowing moment he tries to keep two worlds from sliding away: the Bush is slipping from me, and the town is going too. The central claim the poem makes is bluntly human: when life is ending, what returns is not a neat moral ledger but a crowd—faces, smells, scraps of dialogue, half-loved places—and the speaker has to decide what to do with them. He can either simply relive them or attempt a final act of responsibility toward them.

The opening tone is tired and almost irritated. The city is reduced to glare and friction: the streets are lighted, there’s the tramp of feet, and he is weary… of the Faces in the Street. That phrase makes urban life feel anonymous and relentless, as if the speaker has been rubbed raw by repetition. Yet even here the poem isn’t only anti-city; it’s anti-numbing. The speaker’s fear is less about where he is than about losing scent and colour—the ability to feel his own past.

The Bush returns first as smell: memory as a physical rescue

When the Bush comes back, it arrives through the body. The poem doesn’t begin by describing landscapes; it begins with the smell of gum leaves burning and the scent of Wattle bloom. Those scents function like a rope thrown to a drowning man: they pull him out of Grind and Heartbreak and Never-Rest, those harshly named streets that sound more like conditions than locations. He isn’t just reminiscing; he is being briefly restored to a version of himself with appetite and sensory depth.

That restoration is also social. The speaker aches for Bill and Jim and Mary and the Songs They used to Sing. He remembers the Bush not as solitude but as company and shared sound. Even the grammar of the vision reinforces that crowding-in: They are coming! They are coming! The exclamation points feel like a pulse returning.

Work, drought, and the refusal to prettify hardship

One of the poem’s major tensions is that the Bush is both beloved and brutal, and Lawson will not let the speaker keep only the romantic parts. The imagery swings quickly into deprivation: bare slab walls and earthen floor, Milkless tea and ration sugar, damper junk and pumpkin mash. The phrase a blinding drought is blazing makes the horizon itself feel hostile. Even when the scenes are energetic—loaded wool teams rolling, lurching on like ships at sea—the motion is weighted and precarious.

This refusal matters because the poem is not merely nostalgia; it is a self-audit. The speaker’s love for the Bush is credible precisely because it includes the food that barely counts as food, the sheep that crawl hoplessly, and the dust a man must plough through. Memory here is not a postcard; it’s a full climate.

The goldfields: a glowing dream with grief underneath

The goldfields passages are some of the poem’s most double-edged. They flash with sound and light—Sunrise on the diggings!, a tinkle, tinkle clear, the red flag flying… over golden holes—and then immediately widen into an almost mythic description: Picturesque, unreal, romantic, chivalrous, and brave and free. But the poem won’t let that romance sit unchallenged. Right inside the praise is burial: Mates are buried here, and alongside mateship is private longing—aching, hoping lover hearts. The poem suggests that the Bush legend (bravery, generosity, freedom) is inseparable from what it costs: bodies in the ground and hearts strained by distance and uncertainty.

Even entertainment is paid for in unstable currency: actors and singers are Paid in laughter, tears and nuggets. That line makes the whole era feel like a gamble where emotion and money are interchangeable, and both can run out.

Fictional figures step forward as moral witnesses

A striking move in the poem is how Lawson lets his own characters enter the room. There the Drover’s Wife sits watching… for a snake; he sees the stony face of Mason and later names Mrs. Spicer and Joe Wilson’s wife. The effect is not self-congratulation; it’s closer to being judged by what you made. These figures are not presented as literary inventions but as presences with claims on him—people whose suffering he recorded and must now answer for.

The most explicit ethical pressure comes with the women: It was No Place for a Woman—where the women worked like men. The speaker insists, I pitied haggard women—wrote for them with all my soul. Yet that insistence contains a quiet unease. To say he pitied them is to admit an imbalance: pity is not the same as understanding, and writing is not the same as changing their conditions. The poem holds that contradiction without solving it.

Self-exposure: the names that admit shame

Midway through, the review turns sharply inward. The speaker names identities—I was Arvie Aspinall—and calls himself a mug in the Steelman passage. This is the poem’s most uncomfortable honesty: the “last review” is not only a parade of heroic bush figures, but a confession of masks, cynicism, and sentimentality he once mocked in others. Even Mitchell, called a Kindly cynic, sad comedian, is addressed with tenderness and a promise: We shall have a yarn together in the land of Rest Awhile. Death is imagined not as judgment alone, but as a place where the burdened can finally put loads down.

The tone here softens from spectacle to intimacy. The earlier scenes are wide and cinematic—coach lights, teams, flags—while these later moments are hand-to-hand: a man you once knew, the private admission that you weren’t as tough as you pretended.

The ellipsis and the turn toward apology

The poem’s clearest hinge is the printed pause—. . . . .—after the image of mates slipping a dusty ‘note’ or two onto the table, as if paying a final debt. After that, the speaker stops summoning scenes and starts addressing the living. He calls the bush people my Children of the Bush and then, unexpectedly, asks the young to forgive his own writing: if I… Wrote some reckless lines—forget them. That is not the voice of a man polishing his legacy. It’s the voice of someone afraid that his words may have harmed more than helped.

He names that harm directly: If I have injured man or woman, If I wrote a line unkindly. The repetition of If reads like someone searching his memory for the worst moments and finding enough to regret without being able to itemize them. The poem’s earlier confidence—its ability to paint whole decades in a few strokes—narrows here into a simple sentence: I am sorry for it now.

A hard question the poem leaves behind

When the speaker says forget them—there is little there to praise, is that humility, or is it a final attempt to control how he’s remembered? The poem has shown how powerfully stories keep people alive—how Bill and Jim and Mary can walk into a room on the strength of recall—so asking to be forgotten has real weight. It raises the uneasy possibility that words can both preserve and wound, and the speaker can’t be sure which he did more of.

London as unreality, Australia as the last real thing

The closing lines return to place with a stark claim: Days in London like a nightmare, and Australia is the only land that seemeth real to me. This is not simple nationalism; it’s the psychology of a man whose sense of reality is tied to a particular kind of speech and loyalty. His last instruction is not about poetry but conduct: Tell the boys to stick together! The poem ends where it began—with a review—but now the review has become a message. In the face of death, the speaker chooses mateship as his final, imperfect truth: an ethic strong enough to outlast the city’s tramp of feet and the Bush’s drought, and perhaps strong enough to redeem some reckless lines by attaching them to a plea for fidelity.