Banjo

by Paul Terry

  11

  WORLD TRAVELS

  Paterson returned from the war in need of a job. He remained a sleeping partner in his legal firm with John Street, but his practice of the law was effectively over. He found peacetime in Australia unsettling after the excitement of the war and his thoughts turned to how he could turn his experiences into an income. The answer lay in taking to the road for a series of lectures. He began a national tour on 21 September 1900 in Sydney, where a big crowd turned out to hear him. He was not a natural orator—some observers said his voice was rather monotonous—and he was plainly nervous to be standing at the lectern, but he was a hit with his audience.

  Attired in evening dress, he spoke in central Sydney and at Parramatta before moving on to country towns. People turned out in droves to hear him, paying between one and three shillings, depending on the quality of their seats. His lectures included a ‘lantern show’—slides of the photos he had taken in South Africa—and his material ranged from the tragic to the humorous. On most nights, he played to a sell-out crowd.

  In February 1901, Paterson toured regional New South Wales, gaining confidence as he went. He won applause in Goulburn and praise in Bathurst. In Tenterfield, he almost lost his composure when the audience gave him a standing ovation before his talk had even started. Once or twice he was jeered for being ‘pro-Boer’, but the audiences were deeply moved when he spoke of the sufferings of dead and dying men on both sides. He knew what his crowd wanted to hear and there was applause when he praised the ‘resourcefulness and cool effrontery of the Australian soldier’. The Sydney newspapers admired ‘his flashes of wit’ and his humorous anecdotes of the lighter side of war left his Bathurst audience ‘in a happy mood’. Eternally modest, with a sense of the ridiculous, he might have chuckled at a report that poked fun at his famous pen-name:

  Banjo Paterson was in a western town recently lecturing. Now, Banjo is not real good on the platform; in fact, he’s dismal, as all first-class pen jostlers are. One man came out at the intermission and was asked if he was going back. ‘Going back?’ said he, ‘why, Gawd spare me days, I went there and stood him magging for a blanky hour and the beggar never played the blanky banjo once! What right’s he got to go round the country calling himself “Banjo” Paterson?’

  Banjo continued the tours with lectures in Melbourne before crossing Bass Strait to speak in Hobart and Launceston. His Tasmanian audience was struck by his ‘distinct Sydney-side accent’ and liked what he had to say. The crowd at the Academy of Music Hall in Hobart was so impressed on his first night that many returned to hear him again the next. Then it was off to New Zealand before finishing the tour in South Australia in October.

  The tours were lucrative, but the pace exhausting. The rigours of the road wore him down and when he was en route from Tasmania to New Zealand, he wrote to the publisher George Robertson, saying he was in ‘miserable health . . . [and] can’t get enough exercise’:

  I think as soon as this tour is over I will be off to China or else buy a pig-farm in the country and never move off it . . . The lecturing is not so bad but the lonely travelling is awful. Anyhow the money is good which is the main thing . . .

  Good money notwithstanding, he gave up lecturing after New Zealand and turned his thoughts briefly to a career in parliament. He had made his first tentative foray into politics ten years earlier but changed his mind. He tested the waters again on the night of Tuesday 28 May 1901, when he visited the town of Burrowa near his childhood home of Illalong to address a big crowd at the town’s hall.

  Paterson told his potential constituents that he was there to explain his political views and, if they met with approval, he would stand. If they did not like his views then that was bad luck. He would not change his ideas. This plain speaking impressed his straightforward country audience and there was applause as he began to explain his beliefs. Paterson reprised some of the themes expressed in ‘Australia for the Australians’, and it seems clear that his protectionist position was largely formed by the failure of his own family to make it on the land. The audience applauded when he expressed a view that there were too many large estates and not enough small farms, and there were cries of ‘Hear! Hear!’ when he called for the government to buy the large estates and subdivide them. The applause died away when he opposed the Labor Party’s call for a minimum wage of seven shillings a day, but he was back on firmer ground when he said it was important to keep alien labourers, especially the Chinese, out of Australia.

  It seemed that A.B. Paterson was just the man his potential electorate wanted. But there was a problem. It was not that the locals disagreed with him; it was that everybody was already on the same page—including the sitting local member. Soon after the meeting, Paterson wrote to the Burrowa News to say he would not stand for the seat because ‘my politics differ so little from the present member that I cannot see any justification for opposing him’. The Honourable Member for the Burrowa district must have breathed a sigh of relief to learn he would not be challenged by a candidate of such fame. For his part, Paterson announced he was likely to run for the Protectionist and Democratic Party in a seat held by a ‘free trader’. This never happened.

  The newspapers, however, were broadly supportive of the idea of Banjo as a politician. In June, Grafton’s Clarence and Richmond Examiner possibly underestimated the political sophistication of rural voters when it noted: ‘If he puts up for a country electorate, the fact that Kipling said he rode like an angel may secure his election.’ In October, The Bulletin was full of praise for its celebrated contributor:

  If ‘Banjo’ Paterson wanted a testimonial to his demeanour on the battlefield he could get it from the Victorian Colonel Hoad. The Colonel says that ‘Banjo’ seemed to have no notion of physical fear, and was constantly in the thick of the fighting. He was also one of the most popular correspondents on the field: officers liked him, and the correspondent who is popular with the officers has a good time.

  Perhaps it was his natural reserve, but for some reason, Paterson abandoned his flirtation with politics and decided to revisit journalism. Luckily, he was able to call upon an acquaintance in a high place. Sir James Reading Fairfax, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald, shared Paterson’s passion for developing inland Australia and saw him as the right man to lead the charge. Fairfax offered Paterson a commission to write a series of articles titled ‘Good Districts’. This job saw Paterson traverse the coast of New South Wales, writing about agricultural opportunities ranging from dairying in the south to the potential for tropical fruit production in the north.

  Fairfax was pleased with Paterson’s work and asked him to investigate the potential of an industry that would eventually revolutionise life on the hills and plains west of the Great Divide. Irrigation, said Fairfax, was ‘one of the most important matters for this country’, and Paterson was dispatched on a mission to write about the possibilities of bringing permanent water supplies to the hot and dry western plains. He soon found there was an Irrigation Section within the Public Works Office—but precious little had been done to get the water flowing. The men charged with examining this great project, however, were delighted that someone was taking an interest in their work, and, pulling dusty files and maps from pigeon holes, they urged Paterson to stir up the politicians and the public.

  Soon the Herald sent a photographer on ‘a frightful climb through granite gorges’ to get a picture of a rugged valley between two mountains near Yass. It was thought that these peaks—Mount Barren Jack and Black Andrew—could bookend a massive dam to catch the cold, fast-flowing waters of the Murrumbidgee River. In this way, a significant part of the driest inhabited continent on Earth could be virtually assured a regular supply of water. Thirty years later, Paterson recalled the idea of damming the great, west-flowing rivers was immediately popular:

  Politicians at a loss for a catch-word found themselves repeating at their meetings, ‘I believe in irrigation, and the Barren Jack dam,’ and in a few days the public became d
am-conscious so to speak. The late E.W. O’Sullivan was then Minister for Public Works—a man of large ideas and one that kept his ear pretty close to the ground for indications of public opinion. Like Horace, he stepped nobly up to the bridge, and said: ‘I will build the Barren Jack dam,’ and that, as the Americans say, was all there was to it.

  Work started in 1907. It was a massive project that saw a light rail line built to ferry in materials and an army of workers to the remote and mountainous construction site. The workers lived in huts of tin and hessian, labouring through icy winters and scorching summers. During the construction, the dam’s name was changed from Barren Jack to Burrinjuck, a decision, according to Paterson, designed to make the area sound more appealing to ‘English settlers’.

  Water began to flow to new irrigation farms in the Murrumbidgee Valley in 1912 and when the dam was declared completed sixteen years later, large parts of inland Australia were well on the way to being permanently watered. The dam had cost about £1.7 million to build and Australia now had one of the world’s biggest freshwater storages.

  Meanwhile, eager for more adventure and hoping to reprise his role as a war correspondent, Paterson arranged with Fairfax to travel to China to cover the simmering Boxer Rebellion. In July 1901, he sailed on the steamer Changsha, with the aim of visiting China and Japan before taking the Trans-Siberian railway to St Petersburg. He would supply stories and photographs for the Herald and The Sydney Mail, and, if by fortune a war broke out, he would be ‘at hand to act for the Herald as occasion may require’.

  Still single, and now aged thirty-seven, Paterson sailed from Sydney on 29 July 1901. There was an irony in his hope that China’s Boxer Rebellion would lead to another chance to report on a war. The so-called Boxers—the ‘Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists’—were revolting against foreign imperialism in China and Christianity in general. Their nationalism might have appealed to Paterson but for his mistrust of Asians. He expressed a thought—perhaps facetiously—that covering a war in China would be a hazardous assignment as the ‘Chinese impaled correspondents on bamboos’.

  The rebellion was subdued before he could get to China but, even before his ship left Australian waters, a new opportunity seemed to beckon. When the Changsha reached Darwin in mid-August, the Northern Territory Times and Gazette suggested that Paterson might still find himself at the centre of a major confrontation in the east:

  There is . . . said to be a strong impression prevailing south that the much-talked-of collision between Japan and Russia may shortly become a reality, and that the graphic colonial war correspondent who forwarded such lively pen-pictures from South Africa is now being sent east in order that he may be conveniently on hand in the event of the expected eruption taking place.

  China and Japan managed to avoid war at that time but Paterson did not let the outbreak of peace stop him from developing his skills as a correspondent. He took a keen interest in the people he saw at each port and he recorded his observations at each one, starting with Thursday Island—a ‘place with more nationalities than there were at the Tower of Babel’. He scored a journalistic coup when he arrived in the Philippines—‘the land of Uncle Sam’. Noting that ‘a war correspondent can no more pass up a general than a woman can a bargain sale’, Paterson was thrilled to secure an interview with the American general, Adna Chaffee.

  Chaffee had been sent to China to help suppress the Boxers before becoming the governor of the Philippines, where he led the fight against Filipinos rebelling against American rule. Paterson enjoyed a long chat with the ‘grisly looking old warrior’ and filed a report that graphically illustrated the general’s problems in trying to tame the peasant-soldiers of the islands. Paterson was proving his merit as a war correspondent—even if he did not have an Australian war to write about.

  The Changsha left Manila in fine weather and had a clear passage to Hong Kong, despite the captain’s fears that a typhoon might strike. It was early September when Paterson sailed into a Hong Kong harbour so crowded with junks that a shipmate thought the Chinese were holding a regatta. On the seventeenth, a guide took him to the coastal city of Yantai, then known in the west as Chefoo, where he planned to meet up with the famous correspondent for The Times of London, George ‘Chinese’ Morrison. As he travelled overland, Paterson was impressed with the abundance of fruit and flowers he saw, and was pleased to buy food and silk at bargain prices. The Chinese were happy to take his money, but as he remembered later, they did not make the white man feel welcome:

  Neither man nor beast in China has anything but hatred for the foreigner. As we pass through the little villages and tumbledown humpies of the cultivators the men scowl at us; the dogs snarl and slink off with every symptom of terror and disgust; the cattle snort and shiver if we pass near them; and the mules will watch us uneasily till we go away. The people hate us with a cold intensity that surpasses any other hate that I have ever heard of. A fat Chinese shopkeeper, who speaks English, says, ‘Poor Chinaman only good for chow [is only fit to be eaten]. What does Chinaman savvy?’

  Paterson already knew Morrison by reputation. In 1880, as an eighteen-year-old, the Geelong-born Morrison had walked along the coast from Melbourne to Adelaide and then sold his diary of this walking tour to a newspaper. A year later, he canoed down the Murray River from Wodonga to the river mouth—and, for good measure, walked back to Geelong. Then he went to north Queensland to report on the Kanaka ‘blackbirding’ trade for The Age, walked from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Melbourne in what he described as ‘a pleasant excursion’ and set out to explore inland New Guinea, only abandoning the journey after being speared in the face and abdomen by natives. The spearhead was surgically removed a year later. Undeterred, Morrison continued to wander the world, working as a surgeon and a missionary before becoming The Times’ man in China. As Paterson noted with characteristic understatement, ‘a man like that takes some stopping’.

  His meeting with Morrison was uncomfortable at first, at least for Paterson. His initial impression of the famous correspondent was of a ‘tall, ungainly man with a dour Scotch face and a curious droop at the corner of his mouth’. Their introduction was marred by Morrison’s insistence on talking mainly about women. Straight-laced Paterson never spoke publicly about women or sex and he thought Morrison’s conversation hinted at an ‘unbalance in his mentality’. But when the conversation was steered towards the Boxer Rebellion, war and investment in China, Paterson found the meeting a revelation. He later recalled Morrison as one of the three ‘great men of state’ that he had met. The other two were Cecil Rhodes and the incomparable Winston Churchill.

  Soon Paterson left China for England. He was unable to go to Russia as planned because sea ice had frozen his intended route, but his visit to London proved to be a high point of his travels. There he caught up with that other great man, Rudyard Kipling, experienced British bohemia with his friend, the artist Phil May, and very nearly made his dream of reporting for The Times come true.

  *

  Henry Lawson, meanwhile, had done some travelling of his own. On the night of 4 April 1900, he was farewelled at a banquet in Sydney, ahead of his move to London. The Bulletin’s A.G. Stephens proposed a toast for Henry, saying he was sorry to see him leave but hoped he would return when success befell him. Lawson responded—perhaps with a drink to break his sobriety—by saying that books no longer needed to be published in England to be successful and that Australians were learning to appreciate works written and produced in their homeland.

  Two weeks later, Henry, Bertha and their two small children sailed on the Damascus for London. When they arrived, things got off to a promising start. Henry was represented by a leading literary agent and was contracted to produce books for William Blackwood, the editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Newspapers back at home suggested this contract yielded a very healthy advance of £400. A ‘special correspondent’ in London met briefly with Lawson and filed an optimistic story for Australian newspapers:

&nb
sp; Mr Lawson has experienced the usual Australian stupefaction at the intense ignorance and lack of understanding of Australian matters that are so widespread in England . . . ‘No Australian story complete without a bushranger’ has long been the motto of the magazine editor, and England is heartily sick of the Australian bushranger of gentlemanly antecedents . . . and that is why Henry Lawson will print well and sell well in London.

  At first, this optimism was justified. It was a productive time for Lawson. He soon found his feet and wrote some of his best works, including the Joe Wilson series of short stories. Joe was a character very like the author—sensitive, sad and doomed to meet disappointment. Lawson might have been describing himself when he later said Joe’s ‘natural sentimental selfishness, good nature, “softness” or weakness—call it which you like—developed as I wrote on’.

  He later told an Australian reporter that he spent time in London, following police to learn all of the great city’s ‘misery, sin and heroism’. He might have taken some licence with this account as the family stayed only a couple of weeks in London before moving to the village of Harpenden in Hertfordshire. There, Lawson visited a low, thatch-roofed pub where he enjoyed drinking with farm workers but was dismayed at their insistence on calling him ‘sir’. It was impossible for them to understand, he said, why this term of respect from an equal would sit uncomfortably with an Australian.

  While in England, Lawson also helped to launch the career of another great Australian writer, Miles Franklin. Henry had taken a copy of Franklin’s first novel, My Brilliant Career, to London in the hope of finding a publisher. William Blackwood reluctantly agreed to publish it, on the condition that Lawson provided a preface. He did so, writing in part: