Louisa Lawson When you think of inspirational women, who comes to mind? Eleanor Roosevelt? Queen Victoria? Michelle Obama? Well, remember this name. Louisa Lawson. Louisa Lawson was born in 1848 and died in 1920, was born on 17 February 1848 near Mudgee, New South Wales. She was the second of twelve children of Henry Albury, and his wife Harriet. She was baptized an Anglican. Louisa went to school at Mudgee National School where she was asked to become student-teacher. Instead, she was kept home to help to care for her younger siblings, a common thing in Victorian times. On 7 July 1866, Louisa married a Norwegian man, Niels Hertzberg Larsen who called himself Peter. He had skills in many languages and jobs. They joined the Weddin Mountain gold rush and …show more content…
Peter was often away, either at the goldfields or contract building with his father-in-law; Louisa took in sewing, sold dairy produce and fattened cattle. She was an expert four-in-hand driver. The women in her family believe that she was the original for the hard-working, resourceful, kindly and long-suffering bush women who featured in her son's stories. The Lawsons joined a Mudgee spiritualist group. Louisa had had a strict Methodist upbringing and though she ceased to attend church she remained deeply religious. When she and the children moved to Sydney in 1883, she found friends through the Progressive Spiritualist Lyceum at Leigh House. She kept up a pretence of being separated from her husband by misfortune, but the marriage hadn’t worked out in the end. Peter sent money irregularly to help to support the children and Louisa considered taking him to court. Instead she did sewing and washing and took in boarders. She shared that talent and her poetry, inspired by the death of her infant daughter, had been published in the Mudgee Independent. She and Henry edited and wrote most of the Republican's copy using 'Archie Lawson' for editorial