In 1997 I returned from a few days travelling in the Coonabarabran region in north west New South Wales. During this time I had stopped to explore and photograph a number of buildings, especially old railway stations.
 I have often found that there is a correlation between railway stations and the health of the country towns they once serviced. Like a thermometer, the condition of the station building can give you a quick and generally reliable indication of how the town is fairing. So it is often the first place I find myself visiting soon after arriving in any town.
Not long after arriving home I happened to be reading some of the poems of Henry Lawson. One of these was Cherry-Tree Inn. The poem is a lament to the passing of this old inn. Lawson attributes its demise solely to the railway which came to the area in the second half of the nineteenth century. He describes the derelict state of the inn, with its missing roof, its coating of weed and moss and its crumbling chimneys. The reason for the inn's condition is unequivocal for Lawson: “the railroad hath ruined the Cherry-Tree Inn.”
I realised that Lawson's feelings about the inn were similar to those of mine regarding railway station buildings. The irony of this was not lost on me. While Lawson was lamenting the inn's passing because of the coming of the railway into the bush, my feelings of loss were for the country railway which was no more.
 Cherry-Tree Hill is situated on the Mudgee Road. I travel this road when heading out to the Coonabarabran area. Apparently there was no inn of this name. Lawson could have been referring to the Woolpack Inn which stood at the bottom of Cherry-Tree Hill on the Mudgee side. It was never officially called the Cherry-Tree Inn. However, the name could have been a tag travellers gave to it as a way of indicating its location. Its licence dates back to 1866. During the last three years prior to its closure in 1882, the inn went under the name The Golden Fleece. It is possible that Lawson intended the Cherry-Tree Inn to represent an amalgam of all the Mudgee Road inns which fell victim to the railway.
It was not until September 1884 that the first train arrived in Mudgee, thus completing the line from Wallerawang. Around this time Henry Lawson's father had some building contracts in Rylstone. One of these contracts was for the railway station. Henry's father employed him as a builder's labourer. It is quite possible that he helped his father in the construction of the station.
 The lament for the Cherry-Tree Inn is a specific expression of a more general feeling of Lawson's sadness for the passing of a unique time and way of existence. “The mighty bush with iron rails” was being “tethered to the world”. The “roaring days”, the poetic title from which the previous lines come, were disappearing. Other synonymous terms used by Lawson to describe this vanishing period which he believed was being destroyed by the railway, include the “golden days”;(from The Roaring Days), the “hazy old days”(from Eurunderee 1) and the “days when the world was wide”(from the poem of the same name). Manning Clark, in his biography of Lawson, refers to this period as the world of “old Australia” and reflects on Lawson's anguish at “the coming disappearance of all those bush ways, bush conventions, all that making do, that genius for improvisation of the great army of the deprived in the Australian bush. Caught as he was between two worlds – the world of material progress as symbolised by the railway, and the world of 'old Australia' – with his head he could see the future lay with the world of the iron rail, but his heart remained with that way of life which the railway gradually destroyed.” (Henry Lawson - The Man and the Legend, Manning Clark, Sun Books, 1985, p29)
After his stint of building at Rylstone, Lawson headed over the Great Divide and on to Sydney. But as his writing was to reveal, he could never really turn away from the bush and those “golden days” which he had experienced, before the coming of the railway.
|
