Henry Lawson's connection to Forbes, and a his remarkable mother Louisa, are now on the record.
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More than 150 years ago Louisa Lawson made the 130km round trip to Forbes to register the birth of her baby boy, who would go on to become a poet and national icon.
Now, a plaque recognising her journey and the inspiration she would have been to her son has been unveiled in Victoria Park.
Forbes local and historian with the National Library of Australia, Rob Willis, was researching the 150th birthday of the poet when he came across Forbes Advocate articles announcing that a plaque acknowledging the great poet's connection to Forbes was to be laid.
READ MORE: Happy birthday to Henry
In the early 1940s, local George Gunn was extremely passionate about Henry Lawson, Mr Willis learned during his research.
Gunn, along with the Forbes Historical Society and then President, Dr Kelleher, was keen to have a plaque in Victoria Park stating that Henry's birth was indeed registered in Forbes.
Gunn even had a suggestion for a verse that would be incorporated to highlight Lawson's love for the bush, the chorus of his 1888 poem, Lachlan side:
I'm off to the Lachlan Side,
Where the bright lagoons are wide;
I long for river and grass and tree,
And someone dearer than all to me,
Far out on the Lachlan Side.
As Mr Willis read on through archived editions of the Advocate on Trove, he found the matter of the plaque was raised a few times in the years that followed.
"Apart from the Council itself supporting the project several of the best known families in Forbes the Gunns, Kellehers and the Meaghers, among others, supported it," he wrote.
He brought the matter back to the attention of the council and the community through his column in the Advocate in 2017.
For Mr Willis the plaque was not only about Forbes' connection to Henry but recognising that Louisa was a person of significance herself.
Having recorded many voices for the oral history collection in the National Library, he's passionate about recognising the pioneering women of the bush - and what life must have been like for Louisa and the women of the goldfields.
It was no small thing for a young woman to travel the 67km by horse and cart from the Grenfell goldfields to Forbes, and then home again.
"Louisa Lawson was a remarkable woman," the new plaque states.
A poet and author in her own right, Louisa later edited the women's paper called The Dawn and published her own book of verse, The Lonely Crossing and Other Poems.
It was Louisa who published Henry's first book of verse, the plaque explains.
Lawson's father was Niels Hertzberg Larsen, a Norwegian-born miner who arrived in Melbourne in 1855 to join the gold rush.
He met Louisa at the goldfields of Pipeclay (now Eurunderee, Gloucester County, New South Wales) and they married on 7 July 1866 when he was 32 and she 18. She would only have been 19 years old when Henry was born.
Unfortunately, the couple did not have a happy marriage. Louisa later filed for divorce and - with the children - moved to Sydney.
