Banjo

by Paul Terry

  In the poem, Pardon was taken to Menindee to race in the President’s Cup where ‘villains’ nobbled him with green barley:

  He munched it all night, and we found him

  Next morning as full as a hog—

  The girths wouldn’t nearly meet round him;

  He looked like an overfed frog.

  We saw we were done like a dinner—

  The odds were a thousand to one

  Against Pardon turning up winner,

  ’Twas cruel to ask him to run.

  But Pardon recovered to win, ensuring his name would go down in racing folklore. Confusingly, Paterson also claimed later that the ballad was inspired by a completely different event. In this account, he said the poem had its foundations in a family tale about a horse, also called Pardon, who stuffed his belly with barley and still managed to win a race. Regardless of the poem’s source, it typified Paterson’s lifelong love of horses and racing. They were themes that underpinned some of his greatest works, and, whether or not Pardon ran at the Bogolong races on that New Year’s Day, the experiences that Paterson had there helped to shape his future writing.

  The boy was comfortable on horseback from an early age. When he was about seven, he and his cousin Jack were sent to school at Binalong, and the only way to get there was to walk or ride. Each morning, the boys would catch their horses in a paddock near the house and trot off to learn what they could from the schoolmaster.

  Paterson later recalled that Binalong’s claim to fame was the fact that the bushranger Johnny Gilbert was buried in the town’s police paddock after having been shot dead by police in 1865. Gilbert had committed many armed robberies—first with the infamous bushranger Frank Gardiner and later with Ben Hall. Gilbert was no Robin Hood. In 1864, he shot dead a policeman during a robbery on a mail coach near Jugiong. Less than a year later, Gilbert’s violent career came to an end after he and John Dunn robbed a woolshed at nearby Murrumburrah. The police cornered the bushrangers at the home of Dunn’s grandfather at Binalong. Gilbert died in the ensuing shootout. John Dunn escaped from the police that day, only to be caught and hanged a year later.

  Bushrangers had already captured the young Paterson’s imagination. In Illalong Children, he remembered hoping that the gold escort from the diggings at Lambing Flat (now Young) would be held up on the road past the station ‘so that I might see something worthwhile’. Sadly for young Barty, no bandit ever dared to take on the heavily guarded gold escort and the closest he came to meeting a bushranger was sharing a schoolroom with some of Dunn’s nieces and nephews.

  As an adult, Paterson never held much regard for bushrangers. When he was sixteen, the most infamous bushranger of all—Ned Kelly—fought his Last Stand at Glenrowan and was subsequently hanged. At the time it was the biggest news story of a generation, but years later, when he looked back at his life, Paterson never publicly referred to Kelly—even after the armour-clad bushranger evolved from true-crime figure into something more mythical. Paterson was not one to glorify criminals, but, in 1894, he made an exception for the violent John Gilbert. Like many bushrangers, Gilbert lived by the gun and died the same way. Paterson painted his death in flattering colours in a ballad that told of the bushranger’s demise, ‘How Gilbert Died’:

  But Gilbert walked from the open door

  In a confident style and rash

  He heard at his side the rifles roar,

  And he heard the bullets crash

  But he laughed as lifted his pistol-hand,

  And he fired at the rifle flash.

  Gilbert and Dunn were the last of the bushrangers to trouble the Binalong district, but the area was not new to violent crime. A particularly bloody mass murder at nearby Conroy’s Gap might have given Paterson the title for a jaunty little poem by the same name. The poem told of Ryan, a celebrated sheep thief who made the mistake of drinking too much one night at ‘Shadow of Death Hotel’. This dark place was a den of the ‘roughest crowd that ever drew breath’ and it was there that a trooper found Ryan drunk and with his guard down. But Ryan had the love of Kitty Carew, a girl who worked at the pub. She helped the thief escape on the back of a legendary horse called The Swagman. The horse was the only hero of the story; Ryan, ‘the slinking hound’, escaped to Queensland and sold The Swagman, never returning to the love-struck girl at Conroy’s Gap.

  The real story of Conroy’s Gap was much darker. In March 1868, The Yass Courier reported on the ‘most atrocious and bloodthirsty murders it has ever been our lot to record’ when an ex-convict, William Mundy, savagely killed five people with an axe. Mundy was on a ticket of leave after serving fifteen years for a murder he had committed at Maitland. In 1868, he was working as shepherd for a farmer named John Conroy at Conroy’s Gap, about halfway between Yass and Jugiong. Mundy shared a four-roomed hut with Conroy and several shearers. It was there that Mundy ran amok with his axe on the night of Tuesday 17 March.

  Mundy rose from his bed and, without warning, swung the axe and killed a man who was sleeping in the room. The horrifying noise of the axe splattering through flesh and bone awoke a man in an adjoining room. He ran into the bedroom, where Mundy stabbed him in the stomach with sheep shears before battering him several times with the axe. Then Conroy—who had been asleep in a skillion room at the rear of the hut—rushed into the bedroom in his shirt and nightcap, and he, too, was stabbed and hacked to death. The next victim was Conroy’s wife. She was awoken by the screams and ran into Mundy’s blood-soaked bedroom, where she was also stabbed and then struck in the face with the axe. The final victim was another shepherd named White. He, too, was hacked to death. Mundy topped off the carnage by trying to burn all five bodies.

  The only reason that Mundy gave for his horrific crime was that he was badly treated and poorly paid by his employer. The Courier noted that the killer did not ‘appear to be at all concerned at the horrible tragedy in which he had been the principal actor’ when he appeared in court. In due course, the ‘inhuman monster’ was sentenced to death. As the sentence was handed down, Mundy showed the same indifference to his own fate as he did to that of his victims, and a few days later he was hanged in Sydney.

  This bloody event was the worst single crime to have ever been committed in the district, and to young Barty Paterson and his schoolmates the very name Conroy’s Gap surely carried a black reputation. But the poem by the same name was a humorous, rollicking piece with no connection to Mundy’s dastardly murders. If Paterson drew inspiration for the grim Shadow of Death Hotel at Conroy’s Gap then he never said so. But the murders at Conroy’s Gap are a reminder that life in the quiet country community was not always as idyllic as Paterson remembered it.

  *

  For Rose and Andrew Paterson, life on the land was challenging. As always, Andrew worked very hard and was often away. Rose filled in many lonely evenings by writing letters. A favourite correspondent was her younger sister, Nora, who lived in Queensland. Over the years, they exchanged dozens of letters filled with family news and gossip. Some of the letters that Rose sent to Nora have survived. Spanning fifteen years between 1873 and 1888, the letters provide a remarkable insight into the life and times of the Paterson family at Illalong.

  On 9 April 1873, Rose wrote to Nora, who was pregnant with her first child. The pregnancy had made Nora ill and Rose commiserated with her sister as she suffered through the ‘common cause’. Although Rose hated being pregnant, her children brought her great joy. Her latest, Mary Edith (Edie) had been born a year earlier and was now ‘a nice fat little brown-headed brown-eyed cherub’. Rose also had news of Barty and his cousin Jack, who were both growing to be clever boys. Rose told Nora how the boys went out at daybreak each morning to catch and saddle their ponies to ride to school, returning home each evening at about six o’clock. She was impressed with the education they were getting:

  The present schoolmaster seems to be a very painstaking man [which] I think is better for a schoolmaster than being brilliant & I think he is giving the boys a b
etter foundation in English and arithmetic than they would be likely to get in a more fashionable school.

  On 14 December, Rose wrote again to her sister. The previous year, Nora had married an aristocratic widower named Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior, who had twelve grown-up children of his own. Aware of Rose’s constant battle with the family finances, the pregnant Nora had sought help from her new husband, who was a well-to-do property owner and, at that time, the Postmaster-General with the Queensland government. Murray-Prior offered to find Andrew Paterson a job at a post office on a salary of £50 a year—only a quarter of the wage he earned as the manager of Illalong and its adjoining properties. Rose politely declined.

  Rose was troubled by her relationship with Mrs Brown, the wife of the station owner. She felt spied upon by the Browns and noted they not only listened at keyholes to hear what people said about them, but they also questioned ‘servants and people of the lowest character to find out what we, & others, say and do’. Rose hastened to add that any hard feeling was between her and Mrs Brown. Andrew and Mr Brown got along very well. In the same letter, however, Rose also noted that she was concerned for Andrew’s health. He was regularly laid low with an unspecified illness, and that summer he was afflicted by what Rose described as influenza.

  Rose’s next letter introduced Andrew’s accident-prone cousin ‘Blenty’ Paterson. Short-sighted Blenty was fond of a drink and had a habit of getting into trouble. One hot night in February 1875, he was riding across a decaying wooden bridge on the road to Yass when his horse fell through rotted timber, throwing Blenty to the ground. The newspapers reported the incident, leading many readers to believe it was Rose’s husband Andrew who had been involved in the accident. But those who knew Blenty would not have been surprised that he was the hapless horseman. This was his third serious accident within just a few months.

  The relentless repetition of Blenty’s misfortunes did little to induce him to take more care on his nocturnal outings. As Rose ruefully wrote to Nora, the first accident had happened when Blenty fell from his horse at a canter. It left Blenty unconscious at the side of the road with two broken ribs. No sooner had he recovered than he took a buggy trip with Ned Dunn (the brother of the bushranger John Dunn) that went very wrong. A harness broke and the horses ran out of control. As Rose recounted the story to Nora, Blenty leaped for safety but poor Dunn rather foolishly tried to stop the runaway buggy by sticking a leg through the spokes of a wheel:

  Of course the bone was shattered & he [Dunn] was thrown on the roadside while the horses made off with the £40 buggy, banging against trees & leaving wheels here, spokes there & harness everywhere . . . Blenty (always a philosopher) walked to a shepherd’s hut & got his dinner [Rose’s italics] & then made arrangements for sending Dunn home to his friends and getting a Dr for him.

  Rose thought Blenty something of a clown and wrote about his misadventures in a tone of amused resignation. She was far harder on herself in relation to her son’s misfortunes. The arm that had been broken in the fall at Buckinbah continued to cause problems and Rose feared that Barty would have to go to Sydney to get the bone broken and re-set. In a letter to Nora, Rose said she and the Wellington doctor who first examined Barty were ‘a pair of thoroughbred donkeys’ for not realising the arm had been broken at the time. She worried that the damaged arm would leave Barty with a deformity but noted that he was a clever boy who ‘ought to have a profession which will need more head than hands’.

  Barty’s misadventures were generally less spectacular than Blenty’s, but infinitely more worrying for his mother. In the most sensational incident, the boy suffered the rare indignity of being speared by an Aborigine. There was only one family of Aborigines in the district—a ‘source of sorrow’ for the Paterson children—but this family of three fascinated the youngsters. The head of the family was Billy Budgeree, who wore a brass plate around his neck declaring him to be ‘King of the Lachlan’. Billy’s wife was Sally. Barty’s sisters thought Sally should also have a brass plate identifying her as queen, but Sally was far too practical to be bothered with such nonsense. Their only child was Nora, a six-year-old who could ‘swim like a duck’.

  The family lived in the traditional way. Their home was three saplings covered with bark, and a ‘blackfellow’s fire which never got any bigger or smaller’ constantly burned at the door. Sally and Nora carried the family’s food and other possessions in bags made of twisted grass and Billy wielded a spear and woomera. In a concession to modern times, he also had a tomahawk that he used to shape boomerangs from pieces of timber. As well, Billy owned a piece of limestone, which could conjure rain in return for a reward of alcohol or tobacco. Paterson noted in his memoirs that the laws governing the supply of alcohol to Aboriginal people were not stringently enforced at that time. On at least one occasion, Andrew Paterson declined to reward Billy with alcohol for his own good, and instead gave him tobacco, flour and sugar.

  Billy would sometimes give a demonstration of spear-throwing in return for gifts, but one day he refused. His wife Sally took it as an excuse to prove her own abilities with the spear and woomera. She launched the spear with unerring accuracy at a tree, where the spear stuck ‘quivering, in the bark’. It was a one-off performance that Sally refused to repeat. As Paterson later remembered in Illalong Children, the child Nora then stepped in to fill the breach, with rather less impressive results:

  We could hardly believe that she could handle a spear at all; and, wishing to see better, I ran across the line of flight just as she let the spear go on its journey. Her throw was in no way comparable to that of her mother, for the spear began to drop when it had travelled ten yards; and it was just too bad that it landed fair on the calf of my leg. Aided no doubt by the momentum of its fall, it stuck about a quarter of an inch into the flesh. With the spear still trailing from my leg, I ran crying to my mother and the show broke up in confusion.

  This drama caused little comment in the district, but Paterson later heard it was briefly discussed by two station hands on a nearby property. One of the station workers was not surprised by the spearing. He felt that somebody was remiss by allowing a female to throw a spear when children were about. After all, it could have done some real damage. It might have hit a horse.

  *

  In 1873, when Barty was nine, a great change came to the district when the Sydney-to-Melbourne rail line was built right through the middle of Binalong. Although this huge leap forward would soon bring Illalong closer to the rest of the world, the noisy, clanging construction project alarmed Rose. It was a huge job that involved the work of dozens of navvies—rough, brawling men whose awesome drinking bouts were sometimes so intense that they ended in ‘the horrors’. With Andrew away so much, Rose worried that some of these uncouth strangers would invade the house at night. For her son, however, the navvies were a source of amusement.

  Barty trained his pony to jump over prostrate navvies as they lay drunk and unconscious on the ground, but gave no thought to what might happen if the comatose man happened to wake with the horse in mid-air above him. It was one celebrated navvy, ‘Big Kerrigan’, however, who left the greatest impression on the boy. One Monday afternoon, the local policeman called at the schoolhouse seeking the help of the teacher, George Moore, to arrest Big Kerrigan who was down by the creek wielding an axe and in an advanced state of delirium tremens. He thought somebody was after him and was at risk of running amok.

  Against his better judgement, the teacher reluctantly set off with the policeman to help arrest the angry giant. With much more enthusiasm, Moore’s students followed ‘like a small pack of hounds after their master’ to witness the excitement. As Paterson recalled, it could have ended in bloodshed, but the brave trooper and his teacher sidekick talked Big Kerrigan into surrendering his axe. A nip of brandy at the police station was enough to render the drunken Irishman insensible and the drama was over. This incident had two lasting impacts on the nine-year-old Barty. Big Kerrigan’s terrible state of alcohol-induced madn
ess established in Paterson a detestation of anyone who would sell liquor to a drunken man, and it cemented his view that his teacher, Mr Moore, was a hero:

  Thus did my teacher justify his claim to be considered my first great man. True, he had first shrunk back when adventure called, but look how he behaved afterwards! It was my fate, in later years, to meet many great men—Lord Roberts, Lord French, Lord Kitchener, Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill. Would any of them have done any better?

  *

  As the years went by, the family outgrew the old homestead and two skillion rooms were added to the back. Soon even more space was needed and a house was brought in on a bullock dray from another property and tacked on to the homestead. The boys, however, stayed outdoors as much as possible and the creek behind the house remained a playground. Catching crawfish, or yabbies, was a favoured pastime. Using the same method that country children use today, the Paterson children tied a piece of raw meat to a length of twine and cast it into the water. When the twine began to draw away, the children knew a yabby had taken the bait. The line was then gently retrieved and the ‘whiskers and goggling eyes of old Mr Crawfish appeared on the surface’. A net or tin dipper could be used to scoop him on to dry ground but the children thought this would spoil the fun and preferred to do it with their hands.

  Barty and Jack were fascinated by the bird and animal life that surrounded their home. Jack was particularly puzzled by the actions of a crow, which was seen tapping at the door of a parakeets’ nest. Barty had no explanation for this behaviour as crows ‘have more brains than most other birds, and they do not waste their time tapping on dead timber’. The puzzle was solved with the arrival of Mr Masson, the Government Surveyor. Masson ‘who had been a small boy himself and was still a small boy at heart’ had an encyclopaedic knowledge of birds and animals. He revealed that the crow was knocking at the parakeets’ door in the hope of enticing the young birds to answer, whereupon they would become a snack. Masson then amazed the boys by luring two crows to an abandoned picnic and promptly shooting them both: