by Paul Terry
For Paterson, the outbreak of war was an opportunity to pursue adventure as a writer. The way he told it later, he got his chance at a meeting with Sir James Fairfax, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald. Paterson offered to go to South Africa as a correspondent at his own expense, ‘on trial for a month, which was just about as far as my finances would take me’. He proposed to write long and colourful ‘letters’ to the Herald’s readers, bringing them detailed coverage of Australia’s adventure against the Boers. Fairfax could plainly see the benefits of having the famous ‘Banjo’ Paterson as a correspondent and he not only signed him up, he also gave him £100 towards his costs. By the end of October, Paterson was on board the troop ship Kent, with a commission to send back reports, photographs and observations for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Mail and The Argus in Melbourne.
The Kent sailed from Sydney on 30 October 1899 to Albany in Western Australia where she took on more men and horses. From there, under the light of a faint moon, she began the three-week journey across the blue water towards Africa. As the lights of Albany faded away behind the ship, Paterson said farewell to his homeland for the first time. Ahead lay battle with the Boers. A few days later, he noted in his diary, with tongue firmly in cheek, that the Boers were, by all accounts, ‘only part human’.
A dry humour underpinned his early dispatches from the Kent. With no real action to write about, Paterson mined a productive field when he poked fun at the army. An ambulance unit was on board and Paterson took the opportunity to ask an orderly—a retired infantry sergeant-major—whether the Boers would fire upon the ambulances. The cynical old orderly was in no doubt: ‘Of course, they’ll fire on the hambulances,’ he told Paterson. ‘They ’ave no respect for the ’elpless. They’ve even been known to fire on the cavalry.’
The men settled into a shipboard routine, their days starting with reveille at six in the morning and ending in lights-out at nine thirty-five at night. Everything ran like clockwork—or should have, except that the men settled into little cliques and wanted little to do with outsiders. As Paterson recalled, the medics retreated to a section of the ship after commandeering as many hammocks as they could find; cursing Lancers fought and struggled in passageways; and the machine gunners and signal men squabbled over access to the deck for their training drills. ‘Thus we fared across the Indian Ocean, toiling, rejoicing and borrowing gear and equipment—generally without the knowledge or consent of the lender.’
There was an outbreak of influenza on board and the sick men were treated with a mixture of quinine and rum. When the quinine ran out, the men learned the influenza medicine was now composed entirely of rum and almost every man on board lined up for the final treatment. It inspired Paterson to write a song he called ‘The Rum Parade’. Performed to the tune of ‘Ballyhooley’, it was sung at soldiers’ concerts after dinner, with toes tapping to the chorus:
So it’s forward the Brigade
If they’ll hold a ‘rum parade’,
At Pretoria there’s nothing can alarm ye,
And it’s easy to be seen
If they leave the quinine,
Ye’ll be there before the blessed British Army.
The South African coast came into view on 30 November. The next morning, the ship steamed into Port Elizabeth, where Paterson was disappointed to realise that the arrival of the Australians excited very little interest. Thousands of men and horses from across the empire had already landed, 30,000 more were on their way and the Australian presence was regarded as inconsequential. ‘The kangaroo,’ he wrote, ‘began to think that he was not such a very large animal after all.’
After an hour on shore, Paterson was ordered back on board and the Kent sailed for Cape Town—a place that struck him as ‘very like Adelaide, only that it is built on a steep hill’. There, they found the same indifference to the Australians until they visited an officers’ club and learned their very own regiment, the New South Wales Lancers, had done sterling work in a battle the day before. Suddenly, the men from New South Wales were no longer outsiders and ‘the kangaroo was himself again!’
*
Paterson soon discovered that the colonial abroad was something of a novelty. In Cape Town, he met the Governor, Sir Alfred Milner, ‘my first world-wide celebrity’. At the meeting, Milner asked Paterson to take two English society ladies on a jackal hunt with a pack of hounds. When Paterson said he did not have a horse, the governor airily replied—with a hint that he regarded Antipodeans as natural stock thieves—‘an Australian can always get a horse’. Sure enough, Paterson did find a horse and dutifully turned up for his hunting date with the ladies, who turned out to be the Duchess of Westminster and the wife of a lord of the realm. As he recalled years later, the assignment was not a hardship:
Both were young and attractive women, beautifully turned out, and their features had all the repose that marks the caste of Vere de Vere [a reference to the uppermost level of Anglo-Norman aristocracy]. Both carried whiskey and water in hunting flasks and they both smoked cigarettes—accomplishments which had not, at that time, penetrated to the lower orders. Being handed over to the care of a casual Australian meant nothing in their young lives; in fact I don’t think anything on earth could have rattled them. When you are a duchess, you let other people do the worrying.
Paterson was happy to play the ‘bronco buster from the Barcoo’ for the aristocratic ladies and he ensured they bagged their jackal. But it was impossible to miss the fact that there was a war on. This reality was driven home when he met his first Boer—a prisoner who had seen several battles. In peacetime, the prisoner had been a medical doctor, ‘refined and educated’, and not the monster that the propaganda painted the Boers to be. During a discussion at a hotel, the prisoner told Paterson he thought the Boers had had the best of the war because they fired until the last minute and then retreated. They lost ground, said the prisoner, but saved men.
The Boers indeed had the better of it, at least at first. Although numerically inferior to the British forces, the army of farmers soon showed they were formidable opponents. At the start of the war, during Black Week in December 1899, the British forces had suffered humiliating defeats in three encounters in just seven days. The Boers had modern rifles with smokeless cartridges, allowing them to fire from cover undetected, and the latest French field guns that could be mobilised quickly and brought to bear with deadly efficiency. More than 2500 British soldiers were killed or wounded. It was a shocking lesson that the war would not be won easily and that British tactics would have to change.
Those changes included the introduction of new weaponry and armies. By January 1900, Britain had amassed 18,000 men in South Africa, including Australians and other colonials, with more on the way from all corners of the Empire. It was the largest military contingent that Britain had ever sent overseas. It was also the first time that Australian soldiers were sent to fight in their country’s name.
Paterson was keen to tell their stories to his readers at home but after landing in Cape Town, he was disheartened to learn that it would not be that easy. An army wary of newspapermen felt there were already too many reporters trying to cover the war and it was clear that getting to the front would be difficult. Luckily, Paterson’s meeting with Governor Milner provided the break he needed.
When Paterson said he wanted to see the action, the governor had laughed and said the military was complaining that there would soon be more correspondents than soldiers at the front. Nonetheless, he agreed to help. Perhaps with gratitude for Paterson’s help with the jackal-hunting expedition, Milner offered to write to the chief censor approving Australian reporters to cover the exploits of the Australian troops. It was enough to clear the hurdles, and on 4 December, Paterson was aboard a troop train, bound for the north and his first sight of armed conflict.
The troops were keen to get to grip with the Boers, whom many believed to be ‘semi-savages’. Paterson, however, already had a different opinion of the enemy. He thought the Boer pr
isoners he had met in Cape Town were ‘square sturdy men, much the type of our bushmen’. In a report to his newspaper readers, Paterson noted: ‘We have as many people just as rough as they are.’ It was not the last time that he saw the Boers as human beings, not so very different from Australians.
After a journey of almost forty-eight hours, the train stopped at the junction town of Naauwpoort, ‘a frightful place—just a lot of galvanised iron houses and a dust storm’. The Boers were at Colesberg, 70 kilometres to the north. The heat at Naauwpoort was extreme and there was nothing to do. Fortunately, there were two other press men in town. After days of inactivity they decided to ride north towards the front. Not wishing to miss anything, Paterson, the rookie correspondent, decided to follow them. It gave him his first taste of war.
The reporters camped that night with some New Zealand troops and joined them the next day as they pushed across a plain towards a steep hill. As they reconnoitred the hill a shell suddenly fell and the troops scattered in the rocks. More shells struck the plain below and bullets kicked up spurts of sand as Boer marksmen tracked small parties of British soldiers crossing the open and exposed plain. The shells made a ‘nasty screaming sound’ but seemed to cause no more than a fright. It was quite entertaining to watch the action unfold on the plain below from the relative safety of the hill but later that day, when Paterson had to do the same, the reality of coming under fire was less amusing.
Meanwhile, a group of Australians had been sent to find the Boer guns. They had done so by the simple tactic of riding towards the enemy until he began firing at them. Having located the guns without loss, the Australians hurriedly retired to their camp, where Paterson joined them that night for a surprisingly good meal. His first experience of battle was over. It had been a dramatic day of barking seven-pounders, screaming shells and whizzing bullets, but many of the shells did not explode and most of the bullets missed their mark. The Australian losses that day totalled two or three horses and a shoulder injury to a sergeant who fell from his mount. As a first taste of war it was rather bloodless and came across in Paterson’s account as something of an adventure. If so, it was a cruel misconception of what lay ahead. Before he left South Africa, Paterson would see a war where men and horses were torn to shreds and crying women and children were driven from the ruins of their burning homes.
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Harry ‘The Breaker’ Morant had been thinking about redemption for some time. In a letter to his friend Barty Paterson in 1896, Morant had pondered the possibility of his family finding ‘one prodigal turning up with a request for fine veal’. But the black sheep could not return home a wastrel. The war in South Africa seemed to offer a solution. As an officer and gentleman he might return to England and atone for the sins that had driven him away seventeen years earlier. There was, he hoped, even a chance of acceptance by the man he claimed was his father.
While Paterson was hunting jackals with titled ladies, Morant was making his way from Queensland to Melbourne. From there he drifted north, then west, following the Murray River on its winding journey to the South Australian coast. He arrived on the river’s lower reaches early in 1898 and found work managing cattle at Paringa Station, a sprawling cattle property that ran north towards the arid meeting point of three states. The homestead, which stood on a cliff top overlooking the wide Murray, was occupied by the Cutlack family. Their son, Frederick, was a boy of twelve when Morant arrived that summer and his memories of that time provide some detail of The Breaker’s final weeks in Australia.
It might have been coincidence that a well-respected Colonel Charles Morant had settled in the Murray-side town of Renmark, or it may have been a genuine case of Harry Morant making family contact for the first time since his exile began. Either way, he was soon able forge a connection that supported his claim of being the son of the English naval officer, George Morant. With a letter of support from Fred Cutlack’s father, The Breaker presented himself to Renmark’s Colonel Morant and was recognised as one of the family. Morant’s excellent manners and supposed family connections were so impressive he was invited to visit the governor, Lord Tennyson, and his wife in Adelaide. Bastard son of a British gentleman or not, Harry was equally at home taking tea in a parlour as he was taming wild horses in the outback. Seeking to build a bridge, the colonel even went so far as to write to his supposed kinsman, George Morant, in Devon. According to Nick Bleszynski in Shoot Straight, You Bastards!, the reply that returned was a firm ‘no comment’.
The summer that Morant arrived at Paringa was a dry one and cattle that were roaming the outreaches of the station needed to be brought in before the last waterhole dried up. Morant and another man were sent out to bring the stock in. To the delight of young Frederick Cutlack, they took the boy with them. Frederick drove a spring cart carrying blankets and supplies, while Morant and the other stockman rode alongside. They made camp about 25 kilometres from the homestead and, in the hot days that followed, they brought in the thirsty cattle from remote outposts. As they worked, Morant sometimes entertained his companions with ballads and bursts of song. Cutlack recalled that one of those songs was an original ditty about ‘The Adelaidies’. This work, never written down, was ‘supposed to be rather strong stuff for my young ears’.
But the cavalier adventurer Breaker Morant still had bridges to mend and the promise of war remained his best chance. After noticing a recruitment poster in a pub window he decided to go to Adelaide and join up. He would serve in an Australian army and return home to England with his honour restored. But the ‘wild’ Harry was never far from the surface and before he left Renmark, he performed a stunt for which he is still remembered in the riverside town. On a dare, he rode a horse into the bar of the Renmark Hotel. That bar was known for years as ‘Breaker’s Bar’.
Fred Cutlack’s last memory of Morant before he left Paringa to join the South Australian Mounted Rifles was of the Englishman boiling his quart pot for the last time on the banks of the Murray as he waited for a steamer to take him downriver to the railhead to Adelaide. When the boat arrived, Morant gave the quart pot to young Frederick. He also left the Cutlack family with a photo of himself in army uniform and slouch hat. It is the image that defines Australian memories of Breaker Morant today.
*
Through the first nine months of 1900, Barty Paterson filed long and finely detailed reports of the war for his Australian readers. As the British steadily pushed the Boer defenders north, Paterson described a blizzard of artillery shells and bullets as the British charged across open plains to attack kopjes (steep, rocky hills) held by fast and mobile Boer forces. The enemy was all but invisible in the rugged hilltops and often the British only learned of the Boers’ presence when shells or bullets from smokeless rifles fell among them.
Much of the Boer marksmanship was wide but British men and horses fell in a bloody heap often enough. Paterson grew to respect the enemy, who seemed to be able to vanish like spirits in the rocks and brush of the kopjes. He saw acts of heroism and he saw men die, uttering their last words for women at home who were about to become grieving mothers or widows.
He was often close to the fighting. A good way to observe the action was to position himself atop a non-occupied kopje from where ‘one can see away on one plain the guns shelling a hill, on another flank a mounted infantry force dismounting to pour fire into a Boer stronghold, in another direction a cavalry patrol engaged in its unhealthy occupation of “drawing fire” from concealed enemies’. As this war played out across the hills and plains he spent a lot of time riding between camps to learn the latest news for his letters home. At times, he spent up to fourteen hours a day in the saddle. With each dispatch, he fine-tuned the art of producing engaging, descriptive prose that would be remembered as excellent reporting of Australians at war. He underplayed his own risks, but the reality was that being a war correspondent was a dangerous job. Seven had died in the first month of fighting and Paterson’s enthusiasm for being in the thick of it could easily have made
him the eighth.
The rookie correspondent’s reports naturally focused on the conflicts that he observed. He described cavalry advances over the plains and artillery and rifle attacks on Boers entrenched on the steep and rocky kopjes. He saw men fall to bullets and shells but noted the Boer marksmanship was poor and the damage could have been far worse. Amid the chaos of battle, he also turned his attention to the people and places he saw. Through the eyes of an Australian who loved the bush, he brought the African countryside to life for his readers at home.
The Boer homesteads lacked verandahs and looked ‘barn-like’ but the farms were otherwise absurdly similar to those at home, right down to sheep and horse yards and gardens. The sun-baked veldt with its dusty karoo bushes reminded him of Australia’s spinifex country. He noticed the Boer farmers—who raised sheep, cattle and ostriches—overcame a lack of timber by burning dried blocks of manure. He thought the ostrich, ‘who never seems contented or happy’, was the great mystery of South Africa, but was unimpressed by the springbok. He described the weather as perfect, like the ‘best possible Australian day, sunny and clear, with a brisk invigorating breeze blowing’ and he believed the Boers to be fair fighters, their young men to be very like young Australians and their young women just like girls from any Australian country town.
On 13 March, the British captured Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, in a victory that proved to be ‘ridiculously easy’. The leaders of the town had decided not to fight and persuaded the Boer defenders to melt into the hills in retreat. With the city open and apparently undefended, Paterson took a chance that accorded him a place in the history of the war.