Henry Lawson (1867-1922) was an Australian writer and poet. He is among the best-known Australian poets and fiction writers of the colonial period. Lawson was born in a town on the Grenfell goldfields of New South Wales. He attended school at Eurunderee from 1876 but suffered an ear infection at around this time that left him with partial deafness and by the age of fourteen he had lost his hearing entirely. He later attended a Catholic school at Mudgee, New South Wales. He was a keen reader of Dickens and Marryat and serialised novels such as Robbery Under Arms and For the Term of His Natural Life. Lawson's first published poem was A Song of the Republic which appeared in The Bulletin, 1887. This was followed by The Wreck of the Derry Castle and then Golden Gully. Most of his work focuses on the Australian bush, such as the desolate Past Carin, and is considered by some to be among the first accurate descriptions of Australian life as it was at the time.