Joe Wilson is a fictional character appearing in several well-known short stories by Australian writer Henry Lawson.
Joe Wilson first appeared in "Brighten's Sister-in-law," the first story Lawson wrote after his arrival to England, and the longest he had ever written up to that time.
Tall and straight yet— rather straighter than he had been—dressed in a comfortable, serviceable sac suit of ‘saddle-tweed’, and wearing a new sugar-loaf, cabbage-tree hat, he looked over the hurrying street people calmly as though they were sheep of which he was not in charge, and which were not likely to get ‘boxed’ with his.
He is a young man yet, comparatively speaking, but it would take little Mary a long while now to pick the grey hairs out of his head, and the process would leave him pretty bald.
[1][2]According to The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, the sequence of Joe Wilson stories "has been justly admired for its controlled presentation of the process of alienation and disintegration wrought by the experience of bush life.