Banjo

by Paul Terry

  While Barty was riding to hounds in autumn, Sarah had left Melbourne on the steamer Wodonga, bound for Rockhampton, Queensland, and from there inland to the western pastoral town of Winton. There, Sarah’s family was in partnership with the fabulously wealthy Chirnside family in a station named Vindex. Her arrival in Winton warranted mentions in the local papers and in late May she was reported to be a guest at the Winton Races. The women’s pages noted she looked elegant in a ‘very neat grey drillette costume and sailor’s hat’.

  In June, Sarah’s friend Christina Macpherson left Melbourne—also on the Wodonga—bound for Winton, where she would join her brothers at the family station, Dagworth. She would also see Sarah, perhaps at a house party that was planned for Dagworth. It would be a welcome break for Christina. Shy, bespectacled and unworldly, she had been through a difficult period, having nursed her terminally ill mother throughout 1894. Christina travelled with her father, Ewen, and her sister, Jean, who was due to marry at Vindex in April of the following year. In the winter of 1895, as Christina sailed north and Sarah continued a round of family and social outings in Queensland, Barty Paterson remained in Sydney, living the good life.

  *

  Christina Macpherson—Chris to her family and friends—earned her first place in Australian history when she was a baby. It was on 8 April 1865—when Christina was ten months old—that the notorious bushranger Daniel ‘Mad Dan’ Morgan raided the Macpherson family’s station at Peechelba in northern Victoria and took everyone there hostage. Tall and heavily built, with a dark beard and a hooked nose, Morgan was widely feared in the pastoral districts on both sides of the Murray River and, when he raided Peechelba Station, the people he took prisoner had every reason to fear for their lives. But because little Christina cried out in her sleep that night, Morgan’s blood-soaked career came to an end and several lives might have been saved.

  Morgan had been on the run for almost two years when he raided Peechelba. His lawless reign over north-eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales had started when he badly wounded a police magistrate in a gunfight in August 1863. He followed this outrage with a series of raids on stations and mail coaches. Morgan delighted in robbing squatters, especially those he believed to have been hard on their employees. Soon, there was a price of £200 on his head. But by hiding in the bush and using a craggy outcrop of rocks as a lookout, he evaded capture, only emerging from the scrub to rob and plunder.

  He went from Daniel Morgan to ‘Mad Dan’ in June 1864 when he raided Round Hill Station near Culcairn in southern New South Wales. After bailing up the station hands and their families, he lost his temper and shot a worker through the hand. Remorseful for a moment, the erratic Morgan sent another station hand, John McLean, to get a doctor. Moments later, Morgan changed his mind again and chased McLean down, shooting him in the back. The young man died that afternoon.

  Less than five days after killing McLean, Morgan shot dead Sergeant David Maginnity near the hill town of Tumbarumba. The bushranger fled into the bush and the reward on his head rose to £1000. In September a party of police sent to catch him was fired upon near the town of Henty and Sergeant Thomas Smyth was hit in the shoulder and died later that month from his wound. Morgan claimed the responsibility for firing the fatal shot.

  With so much blood on his hands, Morgan was more dangerous than ever. Throughout the first three months of 1865, he led six robberies on mail coaches or stations. Sometimes courtly and polite to his victims, he could also fly into murderous rages and his reputation for violent madness was cemented. He seemed to operate with impunity, prompting taunts in the New South Wales press that the authorities were incapable of catching him. In Victoria, there was a smug prediction that Mad Dan would meet his match if he dared to cross the Murray River. In April, the Victorians were proved right when Morgan raided the Macpherson home at Peechelba.

  The bushranger quickly took control of the homestead, rounding up the Macphersons and their workers, and ordering them all into the dining room. He made himself at home, requesting refreshments from the kitchen and politely asking the women of the house to entertain their fellow prisoners on the piano. Morgan was in a courtly mood, but nobody in the room doubted he could explode at the slightest provocation. Late in the evening, he locked his male prisoners in a secure room and permitted some of the women to retire to bed. But when baby Christina was heard crying loudly in her bedroom, Morgan allowed a nursemaid to attend to the child. What he did not know was the station’s co-owner, George Rutherford, lived in a house just a few hundred metres from the main homestead.

  Instead of attending to little Christina, the nurse crawled out of the bedroom window and rushed to the Rutherford home to raise the alarm. Then she hurried back the way she had come, crawling back through the window and settling the baby. As she re-entered the dining room, the bushranger was none the wiser that his hours were now numbered. The homestead was soon surrounded by police and armed volunteers who watched the house until dawn. In the early morning light, when Morgan ventured into the yard to catch a horse, he was shot in the back and slumped to the ground. Aggrieved at the manner of his ambush, he complained: ‘Why did you not give me a chance? Why did you not challenge me first?’

  He died a few hours later. His beard was shorn off as a souvenir, his head was severed and sent to Melbourne for anatomical studies and his mutilated body put on public display in Wangaratta. Thanks to a crying baby, Mad Dan Morgan’s violent reign was over.

  About thirty years later, Christina Macpherson played a key role in a more significant moment in history when she partnered with Banjo Paterson to create Australia’s most famous folk song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. The creation of the song sparked debate for years afterwards. For many years, the source of its music was unconfirmed and its words dissected, probed and disassembled. Was it a meaningless little ditty about the death of a sheep-stealing swagman or was it a cry of defiance against a greedy squatter and his henchmen, the troopers? These questions are a matter of speculation. Even the date of the song’s composition is not known although it is widely accepted that it was written some time in 1895. If so, the date of its creation can be narrowed down by following the movements of the main players in that year.

  Portrait of Christina Macpherson, ca. 1900. Photograph courtesy National Library of Australia.

  Travel records and social jottings for 1895 show that Barty Paterson, Christina Macpherson and Sarah Riley can only have been together in western Queensland in the second half of the year. Sarah arrived there in May and Christina in June. Barty was busy on the polo field or hunting with the hounds on almost every weekend. But there are two windows throughout the second half of the year where his name is not mentioned in connection to sporting or social events in Sydney, leaving just two opportunities for travel—a period of four weeks in August and a similar period in November. It is most likely that ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was written at either of these times—yet one small entry in a railway ledger leaves open the intriguing possibility that Banjo, Christina and Sarah were all together at Dagworth Station, not in 1895, but in the stiflingly hot January of 1896.

  The many unanswered questions about ‘Waltzing Matilda’ result from the controversy surrounding its origins. Something unsavoury happened at the time the song was composed but it was never publicly discussed by those involved. Some have called it a scandal, but it may have been no more than a misunderstanding, a case of inappropriate behaviour made worse by a sheltered young woman’s naivety, and a suave and sophisticated man’s underestimation of the emotions he had aroused. Suffice to say, by the social standards of the time, it was enough to create a lifetime of ill-feeling.

  What is known is that during her visit to Dagworth, Christina Macpherson played a little-known Scottish folk tune on a type of autoharp known as a zither. The melody caught the ear of Banjo Paterson and inspired him to write words to go with the tune. He had no knowledge of music but Christina was an accomplished drawing room pianist. There was no piano at D
agworth but when Christina picked up the zither to play a marching tune she remembered by ear, she recreated a musical score that would be forever associated with Australia. Without Christina, Australians would never have sung along to the tale of the swagman who camped under the coolibah tree and drowned in the billabong. For her, and for Banjo, it was a monumental legacy but for both it came at a high personal price.

  *

  Paterson’s visit to Dagworth followed an unsettled time in the pastoral industry. When Ewen Macpherson established Dagworth Station in 1883, the grass grew in a knee-high swathe across the western plains, and rivers of wealth seemed certain to flow forever into the squatters’ pockets. But when drought inevitably returned, the creeks ran dry and the rich pastures were burnt away. Then, when the wool bubble burst, even the greatest of the land barons felt the pinch. The lesser princelings—those with less capital to fall back upon—felt it harder. Among them were the Macphersons who by the mid-1880s had fallen into an uncomfortable level of debt.

  The squatters first tried to meet this squeeze in 1891 by cutting pay rates, sparking the great shearers’ strike. At that time, an angry Henry Lawson warned in ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’ that the dispute would ‘boomerang’. He was proved right three years later when the squatters again tried to employ non-union shearers on lower rates. It sparked the second round of the same fight. This time the strike was driven by union ‘diehards’, mostly in the Winton area of Queensland, and while it was not on the same scale as the 1891 strike, it was a significant battle in a violent class war that pitted workers against employers. In echoes of the first strike, thousands of workers laid down their shears and set up new strike camps and millions of sheep waited unshorn.

  The pastoralists tried to bring in ‘free’ workers to do the job of the strikers. Equally desperate, the unionists took on the scabs, intimidating and threatening them at railheads. Men were bashed, shearing sheds torched and fences flattened. In reply, the pastoralists used the newspapers and the police to harass and undermine the strikers. The situation was deadlocked. Something had to give, and in August 1894 it came to a violent, anarchic head at a station on the Darling River in western New South Wales.

  Original music and lyrics for ‘Waltzing Matilda’, in the handwriting of Christina Macpherson. Image courtesy National Library of Australia.

  The owners of Tolarno Station were facing disaster. More than 400 unionists had blocked approaches to the station, driving away scabs and intimidating any who supported the pastoralists. With the shearing season almost at an end, the owners needed to break the blockade. They decided to do it not on land, but on water. They would use the great inland highways—the west-flowing rivers—to bring non-union workers into the station and get the sheep shorn. It was a dangerous gamble that led to Australia’s first and last act of inland piracy.

  The paddle steamer Rodney embarked from Echuca on the Murray River early in August 1894. Bound for Tolarno Station with fifty non-union shearers on board, she was captained by Jimmy Dickson—a man particularly hated by the unionists because he had transported non-union workers in the 1891 strike. If the pastoralists hoped to keep the Rodney’s journey a secret, they were immediately disappointed. The boat had barely cleared the towering red-gum wharf at Echuca when unionists gathered on the riverbanks to hurl stones and insults at the Rodney as her single side wheel drove her towards a devastating confrontation.

  The Rodney—built at a cost of £5000 and described as one of the finest boats on the river—churned her way downstream, smoke puffing from her stack as she ran swiftly with the current. River travel was the fastest way to reach remote inland destinations, but even the Rodney at full steam could not outpace the telegraph and, when she reached Swan Hill, more angry unionists had gathered to try to stop her. There were heated protests, but attempts to board and capture the free workers failed. Two days after leaving Swan Hill, the Rodney and her controversial cargo nosed their way into the Darling and powered upstream against the current, and against the wishes of thousands of angry men.

  The boat reached Pooncarie without incident on the morning of Saturday 25 August, even though unionists had gathered at a camp nearby. But that evening, when the Rodney was tied up at a woodpile on the riverbank, the skipper Dickson received alarming news. Striking shearers a few kilometres further upstream had strung a wire across the river to snag the boat and stop the scabs from reaching their destination. Dickson decided to go no further that night, and he steered the boat into a billabong surrounded by a swamp of mud and reeds. The boat was tied to a tree but steam was kept up to the boilers in case a quick getaway was needed. Prudently, the captain assigned four men to the watch. He might have retired to his bunk that night confident his boat was in a good defensive position but, if so, he had underestimated the ferocity of his opponents.

  In the dark hour after three o’clock in the morning, attackers with faces masked or daubed in river mud splashed their way through the murky waters of the swamp and stormed the Rodney. At the same time, other strikers rowed rapidly across the river to attack the vessel from the other side. On board, the watchmen sounded the alarm and a man rushed to release the rope that tethered the steamer to a tree. But he was met and stopped by an armed raider who threatened to shoot him. Unaware that the rope remained uncut, the captain rushed to the wheelhouse and ordered full steam astern but the boat remained firmly tied to the tree. As The Barrier Miner reported five days later, the fight for the Rodney was soon over:

  The steamer was then boarded by a few men, who took possession of her. The crowd subsequently swarmed in like ants . . . The first batch, after a struggle, held the captain. The others numbered 150, disguised and in gangs and according to one statement, hunted the ‘free labourers’ off and threw their swags into the swamp. Another gang, according to the same statement, looted the boat of portable goods, while a third gang poured kerosene over the vessel from stern to stern.

  The passengers and crew leapt for their lives as the attackers struck matches and the Rodney burst into flames. She burned for six hours, drifting from bank to bank, as the attackers cheered and sang in the red firelight. Finally, the flames reached the waterline and the boat sank into the murky water of the river. The wreck of the Rodney lies there still. When the river falls, the rusted ribs of her hull emerge from the mud like the fossilised skeleton of a dinosaur. After more than a century, the wreck is mute testament to a time so volatile that ordinary workers became pirates and the rule of law fell victim to class warfare.

  The piracy of the Rodney caused a furore. The newspapers declared it a ‘union atrocity’ and a ‘diabolical outrage’. Worse, The Brisbane Courier feared it was ‘the first instalment of an endeavour to bring about Socialism in our time’. In Melbourne, The Argus described it as an insurrection, and in Sydney, parliament was told the shearers were ‘armed and desperate ruffians’. The resolve of the pastoralists and government was strengthened. Police and armed civilians were deployed to sheds to protect free workers. If anything, the destruction of the Rodney served only to harden opinions against the unionists—but still they fought on.

  Two weeks later, police shot two unionists at a station near Wilcannia. The papers said the police had behaved with great courage to prevent a riot, but the union said its men were unarmed and shot without warning. It was in this environment that eight men appeared at the Broken Hill Court in September over the attack on the Rodney. Dozens of witnesses came forward to swear the men were innocent, and, partly because the pirates had been disguised, all eight defendants were acquitted. It was a major victory for the unionists, who tried to press home the advantage by mounting more attacks on woolsheds.

  While sensational events in New South Wales attracted the headlines, the angry core of the strike was again in Queensland, centred on the Winton district. The trouble had started at Oondooroo Station in July, when unionists tried to intimidate the first man willing to work on the lower rate. As radical union leaders began to gather around Winton, a handful of
sheds were burnt and pastures and wool stores destroyed. The government responded by sending in troops against its own citizens. It seemed the newspapers’ fears of an insurrection were not without foundation.

  But by late August, the strike was starting to fizzle out and Dagworth Station remained unscathed. Nonetheless, Bob Macpherson was heavily in debt and he had 80,000 sheep to shear. Trouble was inevitable when he announced his flock would be shorn by free workers on the wages and conditions set by the Pastoralists Alliance. Well aware that he was playing with fire, Macpherson decided to begin the shearing on the morning of Monday 3 September, and damn the consequences.

  Late on the night of 1 September, sixteen men gathered at a billabong next to the dry bed of the Diamantina River upstream of Dagworth. Among them were the radical unionist John Tierney and a strange loner named Samuel ‘Frenchy’ Hoffmeister—both notorious diehards from the 1891 strike. Gathering up their arms, they set out from the billabong for the short walk to the Dagworth shearing shed. In flood, the Diamantina becomes a vast, shallow lake that surges across the plain, 2 kilometres wide in places, but it was dry on that cloudy, moonless night and the strikers had no problem following the empty riverbed downstream towards Dagworth. Silently, they crept up on the shearing shed, planning to take it by surprise and burn it to the ground.

  But Bob Macpherson and his brothers were expecting trouble. They had gathered men and arms, and, with the help of a single policeman, they were ready to defend the shed against attack. As the defenders slept lightly in a cottage, the strikers crept down the riverbed and into the cover of a dry creek. At about half-past twelve on Sunday morning, the raiders opened fire without warning. Macpherson and his men leapt from their beds and took up their weapons as bullets punched ragged holes in the shearing-shed walls.