Banjo

by Paul Terry

  The train picked up and dropped off bushmen at each stop. Lawson, who always accorded the bushman a capital B, took the opportunity to chat with them. He thought most of them hated the bush. He met a braggart who claimed to have been everywhere and argued with a shearer about how many sheep a man could shear in a day. He came to the conclusion that ‘Bushmen are the biggest liars that ever the Lord created’.

  Lawson arrived in Bourke at about five o’clock on the afternoon of 21 September. He was pleasantly surprised to find a welcoming town, a place of wide streets lined with gracious buildings of brick with iron roofs that reflected the afternoon sun in a blinding flash. He got a room at the Great Western Hotel—a labour pub where he would find kindred spirits—and that night he wrote to his aunt, Emma Brooks, in Sydney. Bourke was nicer than he had expected, he said, but the bush that lay in between was ‘horrible’. This gave him a chance to score a private point in his ‘battle of the bards’ with Paterson when he added: ‘I was right and Banjo wrong.’

  Henry Lawson spent the next nine months in and around Bourke. It was a time that brought him into the world of the swagman, the shearer, the bullocky and the drover more than ever before. It did not cure his alcoholism nor mend his depression but it did inspire great writing and gave him a friendship that lasted a lifetime. During this western exile, Lawson even met a squatter he liked and respected—but none of it changed his opinion of the harshness and hopelessness of the bush.

  *

  Bourke sprawled out in neatly planned squares radiating from a bend in the Darling River. A towering wharf of red gum hung over the crook of the bend, its cranes and cables tending to a fleet of riverboats that plied the green-brown waters far below. In town, bullock drays rolled slowly along the wide streets and on the horizon camel trains driven by ‘Afghans’—men from the east with strange names and even stranger customs—shimmered like mirages from another world. A bustling place, Bourke gave an impression of solidity, even elegance, as if in defiance of the unforgiving lands that enclosed it. The Metropolis of the West, some called it, a place of promise in the middle of nowhere.

  The town was not without its attractions. Importantly to Lawson, there were no less than nineteen pubs. There were also many large stores, several bakeries and butchers, a Cobb & Co depot, three churches, a billiard room and even a fish and oyster shop that somehow sold its salty delicacies brought in from the sea 800 hot and dry kilometres to the east.

  Lawson, who had carried his paint brushes from Sydney, found work as a casual painter. He wasted little time in connecting with the town’s powerful union men and he wrote some political poems for The Western Herald, one of two local papers. But his exile did nothing to stop his drinking. A week after his arrival, a couple of barmaids ‘as cunning as the devil’ sent him to bed very drunk. In a letter to his aunt, he blamed the barmaids for his inebriation and although he vowed it would not happen again, inevitably, it did. But while Bourke did not solve his problems, it did provide inspiration for his pen. One of his most powerful poems, simply entitled ‘Bourke’, showed him in all his brilliance and despair:

  No sign that green grass ever grew in scrubs that blazed beneath the sun;

  The plains were dust in Ninety-two, that baked to bricks in Ninety-one.

  On glaring iron roofs of Bourke, the scorching, blinding sandstorms blew,

  And there was nothing beautiful in Ninety-one and Ninety-two.

  Few of the townsfolk knew that the lean young house painter with the large, drooping moustache and the sad eyes was Henry Lawson, the famous poet of The Bulletin. The union men knew though. They knew him as one of them, a fellow warrior for the Cause. They also knew that in the political struggle ‘nothing hits like rhyme’ and they were quick to utilise Lawson as a weapon. In September Lawson wrote the first of a series of political verses for the progressively minded Herald. The poems were potent tools for the union cause but they paid only pocket money to the author, and the painting work was sporadic. Soon Henry was broke again. The £5 given to him by Archibald had long since disappeared in the town’s bars and while a man could live for the Cause, he could not live on it. It was time to fulfil his mission to go ‘on the wallaby’.

  His chance came after he met a young man named Jim Gordon in November. Like Lawson, the eighteen-year-old budding bush poet was in Bourke to gain experience of the back country. Their meeting on a Bourke street on that hot spring day began a lifelong friendship, one that was cemented by an adventure along the hot and dusty roads at the ‘back ’o Bourke’. Henry and Jim were about to learn what it really meant to carry a swag to an outback shearing shed.

  On 24 November, Lawson and Gordon rolled up their swags and set out on foot, following the winding Darling River downstream towards the big shearing shed at Toorale Station, 60 kilometres to the south-west. Toorale, on the junction of the Darling and Warrego rivers, was a sprawling T-shaped shed with fifty-six stands to strip the fleece from thousands of sheep to be dispatched downstream by riverboat to Adelaide. Their union mates had secured Lawson and his young companion jobs as rouseabouts, but neither really knew what to expect when they arrived. They would learn on the job.

  Toorale was typical of the big sheds scattered across the western plains. Each was a major centre of industry during the busy shearing season, attracting men who walked or rode the dusty tracks from job to job. The sheds had their own rules and hierarchy. The day might start with the breakfast bell at half-past six—sometimes a quick shearing run was completed even before breakfast was eaten—and the men would work until dark five and a half days a week, bent over the sheep and clipping away the wool with hand-operated shears. At some advanced stations, such as Toorale, the recent installation of steam-powered shears and electric lighting made the job infinitely more efficient, but by any measure it was tough work.

  A shearer could earn twenty shillings per hundred sheep. Rouseabouts and general hands like Henry and Jim might earn only that amount for a full week. Penalties applied to those who got the job wrong. Cutting a sheep would incur a fine at many sheds. At some, a shearer might even be penalised for putting a knee or foot on the sheep, and, in a few cases, a man could be instantly sacked for drinking alcohol. If this last strict rule applied at Toorale then it would have been a hardship for poor Henry, yet good for his health.

  Saturday afternoons and Sundays were times of rest when men could lounge around in the shade of the shed or a tall tree while the sheep complained in their pens. Hawkers in covered wagons set up camps nearby, selling necessities and little luxuries to the shearers and shed hands. Tucker was prepared by the shed’s cook—a sought-after position. The shed was a democratic place and the cook was elected by the men. He would prepare food for separate messes—one for the shearers and another for the rouseabouts and shedhands. The cook’s job was well paid but he risked being blamed bitterly if the food did not come up to scratch. Thankfully, in most cases the food was abundant and sometimes quite palatable, especially if you liked mutton. Otherwise, little treats could be bought from the station—flour, sugar and tea were readily available but a hungry man might be lucky enough to buy apples or raisins or a plug of tobacco. Women were rare and unwelcome visitors to the sheds, their arrival heralded by the hot and sweaty shearers with the warning call, ‘Ducks on the pond!’

  Henry and Jim arrived at Toorale near the end of the season. They were immediately put to work ‘picking up’, or gathering the shorn fleeces and placing them on the classers’ table. It was hot and tiring work for men not used to it. Lawson did not enjoy his first experience among the rough and tumble men of the shearing shed although it provided him with excellent material.

  Isolated from the other men because of his partial deafness—and perhaps enduring enforced sobriety—Henry was moody and withdrawn during his time at Toorale. At night, as the other men chattered and argued in their huts, Henry lay awake in his bunk staring at the cobwebbed ceiling or writing or dreaming up verses until it was late enough to go to sleep. But whi
le he was never truly one of the men, Henry did gain from them important insights into the sacred concept of mateship. It was a concept he held dear. Jim Gordon later said of his friend: ‘He was a stalwart mate, generous and unselfish, and ever ready and willing to take more than his own share of the hardships—and God knows there were plenty.’

  The season at Toorale was winding up in mid-December and Henry and Jim returned to Bourke for Christmas. But their travels together were not yet over. In searing heat, they set out a few days after Christmas for a three-week walk to the hard-bitten settlement of Hungerford on the Queensland border. To get there they would have to cross more than 200 kilometres of some of the hardest and driest country in the world.

  That afternoon, they crossed the Darling River at North Bourke and set out across Wild Turkey Plain—a sun-baked expanse of red earth and hardy mulga scrub. Carrying their water bottles and swags and batting away flies, they tramped the weary miles with the sun blazing over their heads and the red earth burning beneath their worn boots. At night they lit fires of camel and horse dung to drive away the mosquitoes before unrolling their swags to sleep beneath a million brilliant stars in a coal-black sky. As the sun rose each morning they packed up their gear and trudged wearily on to the next waterhole or isolated wayside station.

  Other lonely wayfarers shared the road—dusty swagmen trekking from station to station, or teamsters, cursing the heat and the flies as they drove their wool-laden drays along the rutted tracks. Occasionally a mail coach clattered by, horses snorting and sweating as they drew the wagons over the searing roads of red dirt. The drought had scoured the landscape of moisture and man and beast alike wilted under the relentless sun. It was every bit as fierce as Henry had imagined. In a letter to his aunt in Sydney, Henry summed up the hardships he saw with typical gloominess: ‘You have no idea of the horrors of the country out here. Men tramp and live like dogs . . .’

  There is something romantic, yet also sad and rather aimless about the wanderings of Henry and his young mate Jim Gordon through these parched lands. A.G. Stephens, who seemed to have a knack for summing up the hopelessness of Henry’s predicaments, later described Lawson’s trek as being ‘like a journey of a damned soul trudging through Purgatory’. Yet this seemingly pointless journey gave Lawson the insight he needed into the country that he both loved and hated. When it was over, he vowed never to return to the outback, but at least he could write about it as one who had been there.

  Their arrival at Hungerford in mid-January was announced in much the same way as Lawson’s arrival in Bourke—by the fierce glare of the sun from bleached iron roofs shining through the mulga scrub. Lawson’s first impressions of Hungerford were underwhelming. The town, if it could be called that, straddled the border. A so-called rabbit-proof fence neatly dissected the main street but nobody had told the rabbits of the boundary that was supposed to contain them and they cheerfully hopped around on both sides of the fence. In a sketch, Lawson later wrote that Hungerford consisted of two houses and a humpy in New South Wales and five houses in Queensland. There were two pubs—both in Queensland—and neither could provide him with the glass of English ale he craved. ‘I believe Burke and Wills found Hungerford,’ Lawson wrote, ‘and it’s a pity that they did.’

  Henry and Jim camped only a day or two in Hungerford before rolling up their swags and retracing their dusty steps back towards Bourke. It was on the return trip that Lawson accepted help from a man who made him alter his views of the ruling class. William ‘Baldy’ Davis, owner of Kerribree Station, gladly gave the travellers as much food as they could carry and threw in a £1 note to help them on their way back to Bourke. The generosity of Davis, who wore a wig to cover scars caused in a childhood scalding, inspired Henry to later write ‘squatters are not all bad’.

  Lawson and his young friend arrived back in Bourke in February, bonded by the tribulations of the road. It was time, however, for a parting of the ways. Jim soon left town to work at a remote station, while Henry remained for a short time in Bourke, working as a painter and fulfilling his duty to Archibald by writing for The Bulletin.

  In June his exile came to end. He boarded a train for Sydney, still broke and still a drunk but a man who had walked in the shoes of the bushmen he wrote about. He felt no less pity for them and the burdens they carried were still on his shoulders as well as theirs, but at least he now understood them. He had worked and walked and drank with the tough men of the bush and had gained experience that he could never have found in Sydney’s pubs. As his fellow poet Banjo Paterson admitted, Henry Lawson had done his prospecting on foot—and the experience he gained during those hard months in the west took him beyond writing about the shearers and swagmen and drovers and made him one of them. J.F. Archibald had got his £5 worth for this alone.

  7

  WALTZING MATILDA

  Since the death of her husband, Rose Paterson and her youngest children had been living at Rockend with her mother and sister. ‘Mama’ was growing old but remained sprightly and actively involved in music, art and writing. Sister Emily—known in the family as ‘Madam’, supposedly because of her haughty manner—had become a devout Christian Scientist and worked at the asylum across the road from Rockend. A place of refuge, the cottage was a very feminine household that served as a gathering place for far-flung family members. But for Rose, now plagued by ill health, these final years at Gladesville were troubled.

  Rose was just forty-four when she took the youngest children to Rockend, but a lifetime of self-sacrifice and worry had worn her out. Her chronic renal problems were worsened by heart palpitations and fainting fits. A doctor was called to treat her several times but her condition steadily declined. The end was sudden. On 24 February 1893, at the age of forty-eight, she collapsed and died a few hours later. Barty arranged that his mother be buried with her people at St Anne’s churchyard at Ryde.

  Rose did not live long enough to see her eldest son marry, although the engagement was still on at the time of her death. Barty seems to have genuinely loved Sarah. In 1891 he declared that love in a touching poem, ‘As Long as Your Eyes are Blue’. A notable departure from his usual stock of bush ballads and political commentary, it spoke of his lover’s kindly heart seen in her ‘sweet blue eyes’:

  For the locks may bleach, and the cheeks of peach

  May be reft of their golden hue;

  But mine own sweetheart, I shall love you still,

  Just as long as your eyes are blue.

  It was perhaps the financial burden of caring for his ailing mother and youngest siblings that delayed his plans to marry, at least in the early years. By the time of his mother’s death he was sharing lodgings at Wharf Road in Gladesville while supporting his brother Hamilton Howison and sisters Grace and Gwendoline at nearby Rockend. At seventeen, Hamilton was about to make his own way in the world but the girls were still children. Barty was close to his sisters and they adored him in return. There was no question that he would not support them, but he was not a rich man and the cost of their care came as a burden for a man thinking of taking a wife.

  On the other hand, he managed to maintain an expensive interest in polo and racing, and kept several quality horses. It has been said anecdotally that when a young lady’s father challenged him about his intentions towards his daughter, Paterson replied that he could not afford to wed. The father is supposed to have indignantly replied that if Paterson could afford to keep polo ponies he could certainly afford a wife. Whether this is true or not the years drifted by and there was no sign of a wedding. The sweet promise of life-long devotion in ‘As Long as Your Eyes Are Blue’, no matter how truly meant, proved hollow.

  It was only after a deeply embarrassing incident in 1895—some have called it a scandal—that Paterson’s engagement to Sarah Riley finally ended. The bitter termination of the engagement also ended the relationship between Sarah and her close friend Christina Macpherson. It left all three with deep regrets that they never publicly discussed. But it also left
Australia with words and music that would ring out in pubs, on farms, on battlefields and in schoolrooms across the nation and around the world. At the cost of a broken love affair, an old folk tune heard at a race meeting and some scribbled words on a piece of paper combined to create a song that helped to define the essence of being Australian for generations to come.

  *

  The year of 1894 had been a busy one for Paterson. Early in the year, he met with George Robertson from the publishing house Angus & Robertson to discuss a book deal. The result was the release in 1895 of the handsomely bound volume, The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses, which proved to be an instant hit. More than 1200 copies printed in the first run quickly sold out and the book was reprinted and reprinted again, selling a massive 7000 copies. The book’s author, unmasked as Andrew Barton Paterson, was about to become a household name.

  He was a feature at sporting events throughout the latter half of 1894, regularly riding with the Sydney Hunt Club or playing polo for Sydney. In October, he won a race on his polo mount Snowy. That day he also raced his bay mare Bellbird, and his roan mare Blue Bonnett. He finished the sporting year riding Albert in a steeplechase at the Australian Jockey Club’s summer meeting on 29 December.

  The new year started just as busily. There was more polo in the summer and hurdle racing in autumn. In one race, his mare Bellbird came down and broke a shoulder. The hunt season opened in May and Paterson, on board The Ace, joined 200 other sporting folk in the first of a series of hunts on most weekends over the next six months. One of his major events of spring was a point-to-point steeplechase in October. It was also in October that he attended a coming out party for a well-bred young lady named Alice Walker, who would eventually become his wife. First, though, came the difficult matter of the increasingly troubled engagement between Barty and Sarah Riley.