Steelman and Smith are two fictional characters appearing in a series of short stories by Australian writer Henry Lawson.
[1] In 1893, Henry Lawson travelled to New Zealand, where he initially spent three months unemployed in Wellington, sleeping in a sewerage pipe.
[2] He then became a telegraph linesman on New Zealand's South Island, working in a team that was laying a cable between Picton and Dunedin.
[2][3] It is reputed that the Steelman character was modelled on a "commercial traveller" that Lawson met during this period.
"[4] According to the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, the Steelman character "is the focus for some of Lawson's best yarns and tall stories [but] lacks the complexity of other recurring characters in Lawson's fiction such as Jack Mitchell and Dave Regan.