by Paul Terry
Strike camps sprang up, most notably at Barcaldine in central Queensland. Columns of blue smoke grew from camp fires between canvas tents and lean-tos. Billies gently boiled and the scent of roasting meat wafted over the campgrounds. People from small towns nearby provided discounted goods and organised concerts and games. Morale among the unionists was high. But the government was firmly on the bosses’ side and troops and police were sent in to protect non-union labour. More strike camps sprang up. The government ordered the campers to disperse and the strikers responded with raids on shearing sheds. There were scattered acts of arson and vandalism, and scabs arriving by train or on foot were confronted and intimidated.
Soon the strike spread to New South Wales and Victoria, where the newspapers declared that ‘half a dozen blatant and irresponsible anarchists’ were trying to destroy capitalism. The strikers destroyed shearing equipment and in at least one case, tried to sabotage a bridge to stop scabs from reaching shearing sheds. In Queensland, the government deployed hundreds of armed police and mounted infantry to the strike camps.
In March, strike leaders at Sandy Creek were arrested while armed police raided the union offices at Barcaldine, holding the unionists off at bayonet-point. On 1 May, hundreds of shearers marched at Barcaldine, the flag of the rebellious miners at Eureka held aloft. But the might of the establishment was taking a toll on the unionists. In June, the arrested strike leaders were gaoled for three years and the strike was nearing an end.
With a degree of satisfaction, the newspapers said union funds were drying up and some of the men at the camps were ‘in a deplorable state with no money and very little clothes’. In August, the strikers’ resolve was finally exhausted and the strike was broken. It was a victory to the squatters and the government—but if they thought the fight was over they were sadly mistaken. The unions had suffered a body blow but they were not defeated yet.
Early in 1891, Henry Lawson had gleefully accepted a job at the Brisbane Boomerang and wrote prolifically for that paper as well as the labour publication, The Worker. The crushing of the strike later that year infuriated Lawson, who penned an inflammatory political poem, ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’—the ‘wallaby’ referring to bushmen carrying their swags. Lawson’s fiery effort warned that the ‘tyrants’ would feel the workers’ sting and that the workers should not be blamed ‘If blood should stain the wattle’. It caused a furore. In July, a Queensland MP named Frederick Brentnall read part of the poem in the Queensland Parliament, accusing Lawson of sedition and calling for his arrest.
Undeterred, Lawson responded with a bitter attack on class division in verses he wrote for The Worker.
You hate the Cause by instinct, the instinct of your class.
And fear the reformation that shall surely come to pass;
Your nest is feathered by the ‘laws’ which you of course defend,
Your daily bread is buttered on the upper crust, my friend.
In what could have been a case of mixed fortunes for Lawson, he lost his job at the financially troubled Boomerang in September. It meant he had to return to Sydney, and he therefore avoided conflict with Brentnall and his supporters. But the politician and the squatters would have done well to take heed of Lawson’s words in ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’. In the first stanza, he had warned that the shearers’ strike of 1891 would ‘boomerang’ and three years later he was proved right when another strike hit woolsheds across the eastern states. Driven by union diehards it was not as widespread as the first strike, but it was just as bitter. The controversial death of one of those diehards at the climax of the strike is seen by some as the inspiration for ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s most famous work, ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
*
By 1892, Henry Lawson and ‘The Banjo’ were literary celebrities. They were avidly followed in The Bulletin and readers had chosen their favourite. Some saw Lawson as the real voice of the bushman, especially after his support of the striking shearers. He was a champion of the underdog, a class warrior armed with a sharp pen and a passion for change. Banjo, on the other hand, found heroism and humour in his bush characters and a joy in the landscape that surrounded them. Where Lawson saw the raw edge of hardship, Paterson saw camp fires burning and brumbies running in a rural Australia that many in the cities could not experience for themselves. This division among their readers added to the interest in both poets and was helping to generate good sales for The Bulletin. It was also a chance for the writers to cash in on their own popularity. The result went down in folklore.
According to Paterson, it was the perennially hard-up Lawson who came up with the idea of staging a mock battle in the paper—each man putting his side of the debate and reaping a handful of shillings as the reward. In need of cash himself, Paterson readily agreed, later acknowledging in his 1939 series in The Sydney Morning Herald that his rival came to the battle already carrying scars:
Henry Lawson was a man of remarkable insight in some things and of extraordinary simplicity in others. We were both looking for the same reef, if you know what I mean; but I had done my prospecting on horseback with my meals cooked for me, while Lawson had done his prospecting on foot and had to cook for himself. Nobody realised this better than Lawson; and one day he suggested that we should write against each other, he putting the bush from his point of view and I putting it from mine.
The way Paterson remembered it, Lawson said: ‘We ought to do pretty well out of it, we ought to be able to get three or four sets of verse before they stop us.’ This was hotly rejected by Lawson’s widow Bertha, who said in a letter to the editor that ‘Henry felt the pain of the people and the suffering of the women and the children of the bush . . . too keenly to stage a mock battle in the Press for paltry gain.’ There is no doubt that Lawson was deeply moved by suffering in the bush, but he was never averse to making money—especially from publishers—and Paterson’s account rings true. In any case, the poets staged their battle and it ended, not when someone stopped them, but when they ran out of material.
Lawson fired the first shot on 9 July with ‘Up the Country’, a cynical poke at poets who romanticised the bush from the comfort of their city homes:
I’m back from up the country—very sorry that I went,
Seeking out the Southern poets’ land, whereon to pitch my tent;
I have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track
Burnt a lot of fancy verses, and I’m glad that I am back.
Farther out may be the pleasant scenes, of which our poets boast,
But I think the country’s rather more inviting round the coast,
Anyway, I’ll stay at present at a boarding house in town,
Drinking beer and lemon squashes, taking baths and cooling down.
Lawson did not name Paterson but it was clear he was the target. When Paterson replied on 23 July with ‘In Defence of the Bush’, he made it personal:
So you’re back from up the country, Mister Lawson, where you went,
And you’re cursing all the business in a bitter discontent;
Well, we grieve to disappoint you, and it makes us sad to hear
That it wasn’t cool and shady—and there wasn’t plenty beer,
And the loony bullock snorted when you first came into view,
Well, you know it’s not so often that he sees a swell like you . . .
‘Mr Lawson’ was replaced with ‘Mr Townsman’ in later publications of the verse, but its initial appearance got people talking. This was a debate with spice. Paterson’s final lines of ‘In Defence of the Bush’ only served to add to the sense of animosity between the two bards:
You had better stick with Sydney, and make merry with the ‘push’,
For the bush will never suit you, and you’ll never suit the bush.
In August 1892, Lawson hit back with a clever send-up of one of his rival’s greatest works, a nine-stanza effort that Lawson titled, ‘The Overflow of Clancy’. With the lovely rhyming couplets that Paterson fans so greatly a
ppreciated in the real ‘Clancy’, Lawson’s parody told of a fancy Sydney man about town enjoying drinks and girls at bars while a bush traveller endures a wretched night in the rain:
And the pub hath friends to meet him and between the acts they treat him
While he’s swapping ‘fairy twisters’ with the ‘girls behind their bars’,
And he sees a vista splendid when the ballet is extended
And at night he’s in his glory with the comic op’ra stars.
I am sitting very weary, on a log before a dreary
Little fire that’s feebly hissing ’neath a heavy fall of rain,
And the wind is cold and nipping and I curse the ceaseless dripping
As I slosh around for wood to start the embers up again . . .
The literary stoush was a sensation. Other writers joined in, all taking Lawson’s side in painting the bush in bleak but realistic colours. It was wonderful stuff and the readers loved it. In a contest that was more good-natured than many thought, Paterson fought a lone battle to defend the romance of the bush against his critics. On 10 October, he had the final word with ‘An Answer to Various Bards’, which poked fun at the gloom of Lawson and his supporters:
With their dreadful, dismal stories of the Overlander’s camp
How his fire is always smoky, and his boots are always damp
Paterson’s reply to the bards referred to Lawson as ‘The sad and soulful poet with a graveyard of his own’. It was a powerful description of the talented, troubled Lawson but showing the rivalry was a friendly affair, Paterson also offered an olive branch to his fellow poet:
But that ends it, Mr Lawson, and it’s time to say goodbye,
So we must agree to differ in all friendship, you and I.
When he reflected on the duel almost fifty years later, Paterson declared it a draw: ‘So that was that, I think Lawson put his case better than I did, but I had the better case, so the honours (or dishonours) were fairly equal. An undignified affair in the end, but it was a case of “root hog or die”.’
Meanwhile, Lawson continued his ‘prospecting on foot’ and Paterson remained, literally, on horseback. He had met an English cavalry officer who introduced him to polo and ‘we took to the game like ducks to the water’. Paterson loved the thrill of the sport and was very good at it. He also appreciated the connections it brought in society. He kept several ponies and captained the Sydney Polo Club to memorable wins. The matches attracted a better class of spectator and the twenty-eight-year-old Paterson undoubtedly enjoyed the attention his prowess on the ground attracted from young women. In May 1892, the Australian Star reported that Paterson played a game at Sydney’s Rosehill and ‘amongst the onlookers were a great many ladies, and it is easily to be seen that polo will be a favourite game amongst the gentler sex’.
Sports remained his passion, and polo was his favourite game. This love of the game led to the creation of one of his most popular works, ‘The Geebung Polo Club’, which got its first public reading in the little Snowy Mountains town of Cooma in southern New South Wales after a team from Sydney was invited to Cooma to play the locals in 1893. Among the Sydney players was A.B. Paterson, who was mounted on a splendid grey pony, named Snowy. The Goulburn Evening Penny Post reported that the match, on Saturday 6 May, attracted plenty of interest and that Paterson ‘played splendidly throughout’. The paper also had high praise for Paterson’s horse: ‘The way in which Snowy followed the ball and left his pursuers behind was a treat to witness.’ The Post also cheerfully reported that A.B. Paterson and ‘The Banjo’ were one and the same, yet the news did not spread for a while and The Banjo remained largely anonymous.
With the help of Paterson and his trusty Snowy, the Sydney side won the match by two goals to one. That night, a banquet was held at Cooma’s Prince of Wales Hotel and, after dinner, Paterson stood to recite a ‘ jingle’ that he had written in Sydney just a few weeks earlier. The poem was called ‘The Geebung Polo Club’, and, with typical modesty, Paterson said years later that it had ‘outlasted much better work’. As usual, he was too hard on himself.
‘The Geebung Polo Club’ was a rollicking, funny tale about a rough mob of polo players from the bush who took on a team of toffs from the city—the Cuff and Collar team. The match was a bloodbath. It was so fierce that one spectator broke his leg simply by watching on, and at the end of the game, the score was drawn and all of the players were dead. The poem finished by revealing that the players’ ghosts continued the battle on moonlit evenings:
’Till the terrified spectator rides like blazes to the pub–
He’s been haunted by the spectres of the Geebung Polo Club.
This jaunty little ditty went down a treat with the players from Cooma and Sydney as they toasted the success of their game that night at the Prince of Wales Hotel. It was with remarkable foresight that Paterson had created the ‘long and wiry natives’ of Geebung and the ‘cultivated’ Cuff and Collar team prior to the Cooma match, but no doubt the worthies of both teams in Cooma that night took great delight in hearing themselves brought to life (and death) in Paterson’s breezy yarn. Cheers and applause surely rang out as the poet finished his recital. The players and supporters had been treated to something special—but perhaps nobody in the pub that night knew they were in the presence of one of Australia’s greatest ever poets.
*
As the final shots were being fired in the ‘battle of the bards’, and while Barty Paterson was living it up on the polo field, Henry Lawson had rolled up his swag to experience the ‘awful desolation’ of the flatlands out the back of Bourke. For that, he had his drinking problem to thank. Henry had been drinking heavily in those exciting days of the early 1890s. Soon his friends, already used to seeing him self-destruct, knew that something had to be done before it was too late.
One of his new friends was the writer and labour man, Edwin Brady, editor of the Australian Workman. They met after Brady ‘lifted’ one of Lawson’s poems without authorisation or payment. When Henry went to the Workman office to remonstrate with Brady, a lifelong friendship was formed. They discovered they shared interests in poetry and politics and soon repaired to a pub where they bonded over threepenny glasses of beer, broken biscuits and small squares of cheese. From then on, as Brady recalled, they would meet many times to drink and discuss poetry and politics in an Australia that ‘starves its poets and erects statues to their memories’.
Meanwhile, Archibald of The Bulletin was becoming increasingly worried about Henry who was turning up at the office with the smell of stale beer on his breath and tobacco juice running down his jaw. Archibald knew something needed to be done and in August or September, he enlisted the help of Edwin Brady to save Henry from himself.
The answer lay in the bush. Although Lawson wrote with compassion and feeling about the country and its people, he had probably never been further west than Bathurst and certainly no further out than Dubbo. Archibald decided to send Lawson to the real outback to see if it would straighten him out. A change of environment might give him a chance to shrug off the demons that tormented him in the city, and, besides, Archibald knew that Lawson wrote best of what he knew. A stint in the bush might not only be the salvation of Lawson, it would also provide some great copy for the paper. Using Brady as an intermediary, Archibald presented Lawson with £5, a one-way train ticket to Bourke in far north-western New South Wales, and a directive to find some stories truly of the outback.
It was not an assignment that Lawson relished. He preferred to remain with his friends in the familiar surrounds of Sydney, especially the hotels around Lower George Street. But Archibald, who was a true writer’s editor and a big-hearted humanist, would not take no for an answer. He was so determined Lawson should board the train to Bourke that he sent two Bulletin staffers to Redfern Station to see him off, on or about 20 September 1892. One of those staffers was the irascible editor of The Bulletin’s esteemed Red Pages, A.G. Stephens.
Perhaps more than anyone else, i
t was Alfred Stephens who really understood what it meant to send the befuddled and bedraggled Henry Lawson alone into the outback. As the train pulled away from the station in a clanking cloud of steam and smoke, Stephens saw it carrying a man into a world he was utterly unprepared for: ‘Here was this unfortunate towny [sic],’ he wrote, ‘deaf and shy and brooding, sent with a railway ticket and a few spare shillings to carry his swag through the unknown where he knew nobody.’
Lawson was all of these things, and not least a ‘towny’. Apart from an unhappy childhood on the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range, he had little first-hand experience of life outside the city. Crowded, boozy Sydney would always be home. Yet he had a visceral connection to the bush—a place he saw as hard and dry and weighed under by hardship and imminent failure—and he cared deeply for the people who lived there. He rejoiced in their mateship, the triumph of humanity forged in toil and deprivation. The workers of the bush were part of ‘the cause’. With £5 in his pocket, he was going to meet them—and it would produce some of the best work of his life.
At first it was exciting to see the last of the suburbs give way to the countryside as Lawson’s train chugged steadily west towards the mountains. But after the train crested the ranges and rolled into the emptiness, Lawson began to find the scenes that flashed by his window stultifying and slightly depressing. The west was blasted by yet another drought—one that would drag on until it became the worst ever recorded—and the endless landscape of tired eucalypts and parched yellow grasslands was broken only by a series of small rail-side towns, each seeming dusty, and tired and depressingly alike.
When the train passed Dubbo, the last of the foothills faded and the outback stretched out, endless and hard and flat. The soil was a rich, sandy red that glared back at the deep blue dome of the sky. The trees were smaller now and more hunched over, and the settlements were farther apart. Jotting down these scenes in a notebook, Lawson observed ‘the least horrible spot in the bush—in a dry season—is where the bush isn’t—where it has been cleared away and a crop is trying to grow’.