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Said Grenfell To My Spirit
By Henry Lawson
Said Grenfell to my spirit, "You’ve been writing very free
Of the charms of other places, and you don’t remember me.
You have claimed another native place and think it’s Nature’s law,
Since you never paid a visit to a town you never saw:
So you sing of Mudgee Mountains, willowed stream and grassy flat:
But I put a charm upon you and you won’t get over that."
O said Grenfell to my spirit, "Though you write of breezy peaks,
Golden Gullies, wattle sidings, and the pools in sheoak creeks,
Of the place your kin were born in and the childhood that you knew,
And your father’s distant Norway (though it has some claim on you),
Though you sing of dear old Mudgee and the home on Pipeclay Flat,
You were born on Grenfell goldfield, and you can’t get over that."
Extra Info:
The Grenfell goldfields lasted for 10 years and in that time produced £1,500,000 worth of gold, including the highest production of gold in New South Wales in 1870-71.
Birthplace of Henry Lawson. The bushranger Ben Hall lived in the area, taking up the Wheogo Station north-west of the town in the 1850s.
Henry Lawson was born, quite humbly, in a tent on the Grenfell goldfields where his father, Niels Hertzberg Larsen - Peter Lawson, was part-owner of a mine. He spent only the first six months of his life in Grenfell before his family moved to Eurunderee near Gulgong.
By the time that the gold had run out and the diggers had moved on, wheat had become the town's main product. Grenfell was declared a municipality in 1883, one of the smallest municipalities in the State at that time. The coming of the railway in 1901 and the building of the first wheat silo in 1921 confirmed Grenfell's role in the region.
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