Shame of Going Back

A man returns home after years away, and everything has changed but nothing has changed. Lawson tells this story of return and regret with devastating restraint: the protagonist slips back into his old life like a man sliding into an old coat, and the shame of his failure hangs between him and his family like something visible. The Australian bush, that eternal backdrop of Lawson's work, watches indifferently as man and boy reunite and find they have nothing to say to each other. There are no melodramatic revelations here, no tearful confessions. Just the terrible economy of words between people who love each other too much to speak of it. Lawson understood that shame is most acute in the places where we were once most comfortable, and this story captures that specific, corrosive pain with the precision of a poet.