Banjo

by Paul Terry

  In the stiflingly hot summer of 1882, the estate was broken up and part of it sold to two brothers named Friend, with Henry Brown’s widow retaining one third. Rose liked the brothers, who had supplied materials to renovate the decaying homestead, but she had a very low opinion of their wives and thought even less of the widow Brown. Naturally, Andrew got on well with all parties and was in negotiations to manage the property for the new owners, supposedly for the healthy salary of £500 a year.

  Barty continued to live at Gladesville and enjoyed the company of his friends, including his cousin Jack who had left school to become a clerk with the New South Wales Railways. Although they were well-behaved young men, they might have indulged in high-spirited behaviour typical of lads their age. In one account of their youth, the daughter of Paterson’s uncle Frank remembered the cousins sharing a shack at the edge of the river. They had bought a battered horse-drawn buggy that hurtled around the streets, much like today’s young men ‘hooning’ in ageing but fast cars.

  At around this time, the young Paterson gained his certificate to practise as a solicitor and he became the managing clerk with a large firm that acted for three banks. Later, he went into partnership with the Sydney lawyer, John Street. In the meantime, the troubles of the poor helped to instil in Paterson a certain cynicism for his chosen profession and, with the idealism of the young he began to think that ‘it was up to me to set the world right’.

  In his spare time, he studied history and economics, and, driven by a desire for reform, he produced his first literary effort—a political pamphlet called ‘Australia for the Australians’. Although this work—which was published in 1889—later caused him much embarrassment (‘I blush every time that I think of it!’), it was a heartfelt treatise that showed that Paterson in his twenties was fired with youthful idealism.

  ‘Australia for the Australians’ was nationalistic, protectionist and humanist. It contrasted the high life enjoyed by property owners in Sydney with the struggles of inland settlers who had little hope of reward for their toil. At the heart of the treatise was a call for land reform, and a demand for the abolition of granting large tracts of lands in ‘fee simple’—an ancient rule that gave almost unlimited rights to property owners. Ominously, it warned that Australia could become like Ireland—a land of poor and dissatisfied tenant farmers.

  Paterson’s treatise also urged its readers to walk in the shoes of the poor. Leading by example, Paterson wrote that he had resolved to live for a time in a low-class Sydney lodging house to see how the poor lived. He was used to roughing it in the bush and was no shrinking violet when it came to hardship—but he lasted just one night in the lodging house:

  To the frightful discomfort was added the serious danger of disease from the filthy surroundings and unhealthy atmosphere. I fled. And yet what I, a strong man, dared not undertake for a week, women and children have to go through from year’s end to year’s end . . . Do you, reader, believe that it is an inevitable law that in a wealthy country like this we must have so much poverty?

  The treatise revealed Paterson to be an angry young man, fired with a need to ‘put things right’. But ‘Australia for the Australians’ caused almost no stir at all. As an older, far more conservative man, he noted that it ‘fell as flat as the great inland desert’, but even as he aged, he did not lose empathy with the poor, especially those of the bush. It was not the last time he dabbled in politics but, by his own admission, it was the failure of the treatise that pushed him further from politics and closer to poetry.

  *

  Paterson the lawyer worked hard to get the best for his clients in troubled times, but his thoughts were rarely far from the bush and he took every chance he could to escape the city for the clean air of the hills and plains. Sports also remained a passion. He rowed for Balmain and regularly played tennis but racing was his favourite pastime. He won several steeplechase races and rode as an amateur jockey at Randwick and Rosehill. In more refined outings, he joined red-coated gentlefolk in pursuit of foxes with the Sydney Hunt Club. Paterson loved the thrill of the sport and he was at ease in the company of Sydney’s social elite.

  For the first few years, his work as a lawyer was demanding, if a little tedious, but he found time to produce verses that were published anonymously in a radical new paper called The Bulletin. Paterson was vague about these early efforts; the first, he said, was the ‘account of a glove fight’ that has never been identified. It was followed by ‘some sentimental verses’ which, to his surprise, were also published. Paterson later said he decided not to use his real name with these early works because he feared the editor would associate him with ‘Australia for the Australians’. This might have been true, but it is also possible that as a rising man about town and a respected young lawyer Paterson was reluctant to see his real name linked to the provocative and outspoken Bulletin.

  One of his early poems, ‘El Mahdi to the Australian Troops’, was inspired by a military campaign on the other side of the world. In 1881, rebels had revolted against a British-backed Egyptian government in the Sudan. Led by Muhammad Ahmad—or El Mahdi—the rebels won a decisive victory and trapped the Egyptian army. The British sent the revered general Charles Gordon to extricate the trapped Egyptians while a force of troops and artillery was mustered in New South Wales to join the campaign. To the dismay of the Empire, Gordon was killed before the New South Wales contingent set sail and the Mahdi rebellion was ultimately successful. But the colony’s readiness to rush Australians off to this useless mission irked Paterson, so he ‘strung together four flamboyant verses’ in opposition to the venture.

  It was a cynical work that, seen through the eyes of the rebel leader El Mahdi, spoke of the Australian soldiers striking ‘a blow for tyranny and wrong’. It would have been frowned upon by some in the establishment in Australia, which was surely why The Bulletin decided to publish it in 1885. Just five years old, The Bulletin was nationalistic, avowedly republican and sometimes just plain contrary. Although his flamboyant opposition to the Mahdi expedition was not his best work, it did strike a chord with the freethinkers at the radical new paper and, to Paterson’s delight, the poem was published on 28 February.

  In 1886, history was made when Paterson thought up a lasting pseudonym for his work. He had dabbled with several pen names, including the simple ‘B’, and ‘Cincinnatus”—a nod to the colourful American poet Cincinnatus Miller—but when Paterson chose to call himself ‘The Banjo’, it stuck for life. It had nothing to do with music—Paterson had never even held a banjo, far less played one. Instead, it came from his passion for horses. When he pondered potential pen-names, an image of one horse sprung to mind. It was a ‘so-called racehorse’—no more special than any other—that had been on the family property when Paterson was a boy. That horse’s name was Banjo and it seemed to the aspiring writer that ‘Banjo’ was as good a name as any for a poet. It was a decision that gave the obscure horse its own little place in history and Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson an identity that would help to shape modern Australia.

  In June, The Bulletin published ‘The Bushfire, An Allegory’—the first poem to appear under the Banjo pseudonym. It caused little commentary although, like ‘Australia for the Australians’, it is noteworthy for its youthful idealism. It linked a deliberately lit fire on a tinder dry property in Australia to Ireland’s demand for Home Rule from England. In the poem, Billy Gladstone (British Prime Minister William Gladstone) fights the fire with a blue-gum bough (Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill) but a ‘cornstalk kid’ (a colonial) tells Billy that there is no use in fighting the fire unless he catches the people who lit it. The point was that Britain should not fight the Irish cause unless it understood the anger that underpinned it. In the poem, Billy refuses to listen to the cornstalk kid and, while he is rejecting the advice, the bushfire flares up anew.

  In August, the twenty-two-year-old Paterson received a short letter from Jules Francois Archibald, The Bulletin’s charismatic editor. Baptised John Feltham
Archibald, he changed his given names to sound French during the Bohemian days of his youth. In 1880, at the age of twenty-four, he co-founded The Bulletin with the aim of promoting radical, humanist ideas and a promise to deliver only ‘the interesting half of the news’. From its first edition—which featured extensive coverage of the execution of Captain Moonlite, ‘the Wantabadgery Bushranger’—The Bulletin had grown to become known as ‘The Bushman’s Bible’. It was amusing, highly nationalistic, and fought for the underdog against cold-hearted banks and absentee landlords. It was also a nursery for emerging artistic and literary talent. Archibald had a gift for discovering such talent and his letter to Barty Paterson in 1886 offered the young poet a chance to make his name:

  Will you drop in and see me at your earliest convenience, as I’d like a long talk with you about a lot of things. I shall be glad to have from you any topical Australian verses which may come into your head and you would do me a great favour by trying your hand at writing for us weekly some short sharp snappy paragraphs—two, three or four lines each, no more—suitable for production under any one of our headings. As you no doubt see, The Bulletin aims at being an Australasian rather than a mere Sydney or N.S.W. publication so we endeavour to get matter, which while acceptable to the reader in this city will also suit his brother at Cape York and the other fellow down at Cape Otway or Perth. The remaining chief items in our policy are to ‘howl for the undermost dog’—all of the rest of the press are generally engaged in sooling on the pup that’s got the grip—and to print all the awkward things procurable.

  *

  It was with a sense of trepidation that Paterson approached The Bulletin office in Sydney. Pitt Street was alive with humanity in a rush. Tram bells rang, hoofs clattered on the road, iron-rimmed carriage wheels rumbled across the neatly sealed roads and children shouted and squabbled while their parents went about their business. But the noise and the crowds and the smoke from factory chimneys were a world away from Paterson’s thoughts, for these were turned to the meeting he was about to have with Archibald.

  Paterson nervously climbed a dingy flight of stairs to a dusty first-floor office where he found himself standing before a closed door marked, ‘Mr Archibald, Editor’. Paterson noticed that a ‘spirited drawing’ was pinned to the door. It showed the body of a man lying ‘quite loose on the strand with a dagger through him’. Accompanying the stabbed man was a message: ‘Archie, this is what will happen to you if you don’t use my drawing about the policeman!’ Clearly, the creator of the policeman drawing had no fear of the editor’s wrath. It was an enormous relief to the nervous Paterson who immediately thought The Bulletin must be ‘a free and easy place’. Feeling a little more confident, he knocked at the door and was admitted for an interview that changed his life.

  His discussion with Archibald lasted just ten minutes. The editor said he would like the young writer to try his hand at more verse. Did he know anything about the bush? He did? He was born and raised there? It was perfect. ‘All right,’ said the bearded and bespectacled editor, ‘have a go at the bush. Have a go at anything that strikes you. Don’t write anything like . . . other people if you can help it. Let’s see what you can do.’

  As it turned out, what Andrew Barton Paterson, alias The Banjo, could do was rather remarkable.

  *

  The Bulletin published ‘A Dream of the Melbourne Cup’ in October. Paterson subtitled the poem ‘A Long Way After Gordon’ as a way of stating his belief that the work was inferior to the poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon, the poet, politician and horseman. His next effort was the ballad ‘The Mylora Elopement’. Encouraged now, he soon produced more verses including ‘Only a Jockey’, a sad account of the death of a fourteen-year-old jockey in a race fall in Melbourne, and then ‘Old Pardon, The Son of Reprieve’—one of his better works that might have been inspired by that trip to the Bogolong Races years earlier. This effort was followed by other works dealing with subjects as diverse as politics, circuses and minstrel shows.

  But writing provided only pocket money. Each published poem netted a standard sum of thirteen shillings and sixpence. Accordingly, the practice of law had to be his priority. Ironically, though, it was his work as a lawyer that introduced Paterson to another young man who would define the Australian landscape with words. That man’s name was Henry Lawson. He was a painter by trade, but his true talents lay in his pen and he came to see Paterson at his office for legal advice on dealing with publishers. Their meeting began an association that would see both men remembered as the ‘Twin Deities of The Bulletin’.

  Unlike the confident Paterson, Lawson was introverted, thanks in part to a serious hearing impairment and a history of social awkwardness as a child. Lawson was a fervent republican with a deep concern for those suffering poverty or injustice. He had appeared on the literary scene as a result of the ‘Republican Riots’ of 1887—a series of heated and disorderly meetings in Sydney to discuss public celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. It was a time when republicanism was a potent political force in Australia. At the first meeting in June, the monarchists, led by the New South Wales Premier, Sir Henry Parkes, proposed a grand fete for Sydney’s Sunday school students to celebrate the Jubilee. But militant republicans stacked the meeting and voted down the proposal as ‘unwise and calculated to injure the democratic spirit of the country’. The meeting ended in turmoil and another was scheduled for the following week._This time, admittance would be by official invitation to keep out the troublemakers.

  The republicans, however, forged their entry tickets and occupied the town hall in huge numbers. The loyalists tried to maintain control by erecting physical barriers against the militants but the barriers were shoved aside and mayhem ensued. In a wild stoush, a motion to honour the Queen was howled down before it could even be put to the floor. The Bulletin tore strips from the loyalists, saying ‘they violently assaulted the speakers selected by the people, and roughly ejected them from the chamber!’ But The Sydney Morning Herald railed against the rebellious republicans, who it said, turned ‘the proceedings into an absolute chaos of uproar, confusion, faction-fighting and ruffianism . . .’

  Both papers probably got it at least partly right, but Lawson was so infuriated by the Herald’s words that he penned some of his own. Angrily, he wrote ‘Sons of the South’, a stirring call to arms for Australian radicals to ‘Awake! Arise!’ On 1 October, The Bulletin’s Archibald published the poem, which he retitled ‘A Song of the Republic’, and Lawson’s brilliant, tragic career as a writer began to take flight. Soon, he wrote the indignant ‘Faces in the Street’—a bitter denunciation of the urban poverty he had seen in the crowded streets of Sydney—and then ‘The Army of the Rear’, which railed against the huge disparity between rich and poor.

  Henry Lawson had been born—by his own account—in a tent on the goldfields at Grenfell in New South Wales on the dark and stormy night of 17 June 1867. His father was a Norwegian sailor named Neils Larsen (anglicised to Lawson) and his mother was Louisa Albury, a bright young lady with a talent for literature and music. It was a marriage characterised by conflict and hardship. Hoping for a change of luck, Neils looked for gold, but when this met with little success, the family returned to the land. For a short time, they lived in a two-roomed hut on a rather poor selection at Eurunderee, near Mudgee, but farming proved to be just as unproductive as prospecting.

  Henry’s hearing began to fail when he was about nine and was almost completely lost five years later. His disability made it hard for him to socialise with other children and he did poorly at school, except in English composition where he showed significant ability. When he was about fourteen, he left school and travelled with his father, who was now working as a builder. There was little to keep Lars and Louisa together and, in 1883, she moved to Sydney. Henry soon joined her there and was apprenticed to a coach painter.

  Free from her husband, Louisa became involved in the tumultuous world of revolutionary politics in Sydney. She became the
founder and publisher of The Dawn, a newspaper described in the mainstream papers as being ‘essentially for ladies, in which to vent their wrongs, to proclaim their victories over heartless men and to give advice’. Dawn was in fact more than a ladies’ journal. It was published from Louisa’s home in Phillip Street—an address that was said to be a hotbed of radicalism where such controversies as women’s rights were passionately discussed. Louisa—who was always referred to in the papers as the mother of Henry Lawson—later said in a letter that she hoped one day to ‘be strong enough to look the public in the face as Louisa Lawson, and not as the mother of a man. A man writes me up, a man takes my photograph and I appear as the mother of a man’.

  It was hardly surprising that her son—partially deaf, socially withdrawn and afflicted with a drinking problem that would worsen as he aged—burned with genuine social outrage and a desire for change. Barty Paterson shared Lawson’s empathy with the people of the bush but, unlike Lawson, Paterson was a son of the squattocracy, with no driving force towards radicalism. Nonetheless, each recognised admirable qualities in the other and, although never close friends, they hit it off when they met as lawyer and client.

  In one conversation, perhaps as an antidote to the boredom of processing Lawson’s publishing contracts, Paterson asked his fellow poet how he got his ideas. Lawson replied: ‘I can catch ideas anywhere, but I can’t always make ’em go into harness. Simple stuff is the best. One day I picked up a pair of pants and found they had a hole in the stern and I wrote, “You’ve got to face your troubles ‘When Your Pants Begin to Go’.”