Banjo

by Paul Terry

  The day finished with a victory for the horse when one of the cars broke down and had to be drawn into town behind a ‘horsed trolley’. The mayor welcomed the competitors with an official celebration. Most were battered and bruised and would have preferred to rest, but turned up anyway to spare the mayor’s feelings. The competitors needed all the rest they could get. The New South Wales papers said the roads south of the border were appalling. One driver agreed, observing that motoring on Victorian roads was like ‘driving over an old graveyard with the tombstones sticking up’.

  Of the twenty-three cars that set out from Sydney, seventeen made it all the way to the finish line in Melbourne. Among the last to arrive were Paterson and Arnott. Late but not defeated, they limped into Melbourne just in time for the welcoming speeches to the rest of the fleet. Thousands of people turned out to see the cars arrive and, although there was no clear winner, observers noted the motor car would prove to be the transport of the future.

  It was not the last time that Paterson would take a motoring journey with Jack Arnott. In February 1906, they drove from Sydney to the Burrinjuck area, where they enjoyed some excellent fishing for trout. From there, they travelled to the town of Tumut where Paterson disappointed locals by telling the editor of the Tumut Advocate that he preferred the town of Yass to Tumut as a possible site for the future national capital. After a short stay in Tumut, Paterson and Arnott drove to the Yarrangobilly Caves in the Snowy Mountains before visiting Jindabyne for more fishing. Then it was home to Sydney, where his wife Alice was expecting their second child.

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  BACK TO THE BUSH

  Although the sub-editor, Claude McKay, remembered that his boss ‘had no instinct whatsoever’ for news, Paterson managed to produce The Evening News paper several times each day while retaining the goodwill of his staff and readership. In his spare time, he worked on a project dear to his heart. For some ten years he had been collecting old bush songs with plans for a book of the same name. He travelled far and wide to collect these songs, doing much to ensure they were rescued from obscurity, as a rapidly changing Australia moved away from its bush traditions.

  Eventually, fifty-five works were published in the book early in 1906. Among them were ‘Bold Jack Donahoo’, ‘Five Miles from Gundagai’ and ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. The book’s cover featured a bullocky singing as he led his beasts along a quiet country road. A little ditty printed on a bottom corner extolled the virtues of ‘stringybark and green hide’.

  Old Bush Songs was welcomed by reviewers, who already had a sense of nostalgia for an Australia that was fading away. Adelaide’s The Register urged readers to part with a half-crown to buy a copy while, in Perth, The Daily News predicted a new generation of bushmen would enjoy the book and ‘the old-timers would cry over it’. Readers must have had the same yearning for the old days because it was a hit, selling about 5000 copies in its first year.

  Claude McKay’s memory of a relaxed Paterson as editor was misleading. The pressures of the job were taking a toll and soon after the release of Old Bush Songs he left The Evening News to become the editor of the Australian Town and Country Journal. The weekly Journal, with its focus on rural readers, seemed to be more his style.

  Meanwhile, life on the home front could not have been better. On 9 May, Barty and a heavily pregnant Alice attended an interstate tennis match at Double Bay and five days later Alice gave birth to a little boy, at the family home in Woollahra. They named him Hugh—a brother to Grace—now aged two.

  Paterson continued to edit the Journal for another two years but even at the slower pace, his health declined. He tired easily and caught cold often. As his nerves frayed, and with the children growing, his thoughts turned increasingly towards a life on the land. Although he had lived most of his adult life in Sydney, his heart remained in the country, especially his beloved upper Murrumbidgee region in the steep foothills of the Snowy Mountains, and he hoped to make his family’s home there.

  The opportunity came late in 1907 when a station called Coodra Vale, at Wee Jasper south-east of Yass was offered for sale. Made up of about 40,000 acres (16,188 hectares) of steep, rocky country, it was just what Paterson was looking for. ‘I want my children to grow up loving the country and the horses like I did,’ he said, ‘and Alice is only too happy about it.’ Also, their new home would be closer to Melbourne and therefore ‘easier to get to the Cup’. More importantly, the change would be good for his health. The strain of editing two newspapers had taken a toll and, in January 1908, he wrote a letter of resignation from the paper.

  In March, he formed the Coodra Vale Company with some partners and sold the family home, West Hall. To augment his capital, he wrote in June to his publisher, George Robertson, asking him to make an offer for the copyright for ‘The Man From Snowy River’ and other works. The letter gave a sense of Paterson’s growing sense of claustrophobia in Sydney. He told Robertson that he hoped to get ‘some decent work done’ when he returned to the bush, and also that he always felt seedy in Sydney.

  Not everyone wished him success. In October, as the family moved into their new home, an old foe in the Catholic Press sneered that Paterson the ‘horse poet’ had become ‘something of a cockygrazier in the Barren Jack district’:

  Here was a man who caught the popular taste with his first work, and slumped badly with his later efforts. He was never a poet at any time, but in ‘The Man From Snowy River’ he strung together horsey rhymes with pleasing facility. This was a type of verse specially suited to the backblocker and the stable boy, but Australia is not as horsey as it was, or at least its taste has improved so that it is satisfied with a very thin sprinkling of the horse poet’s productions.

  Paterson might have taken some consolation in knowing that thousands of book buyers disagreed. In any case, it was Paterson himself who claimed to be a ‘versifier’, not a poet, so the criticism was rather mean-spirited. Also, by his own admission, his new home was in the backblocks, a land, he said, that had been ‘left over when the rest of the world was made’.

  The family’s new home was a sturdy, square cottage with a wrap-around verandah on a narrow flat between steep foothills. The Goodradigbee River chuckled over a shoal of rocks at their front door and a long, green flat stretched away to either side. The river was useful for watering stock but it also offered potential in a newly emerging tourism business. Since the construction of Burrinjuck Dam, the clear, winding Goodradigbee and other local streams had become sought-after destinations for fly fishermen casting for wily mountain trout. Paterson and his partners in Coodra Vale hoped to take advantage of this growing interest by offering accommodation to anglers, who could now motor from Sydney to Wee Jasper in a day or two.

  Most of all, ‘Coodra’ was serene and beautiful, and although ‘as a station prospect [it] was best avoided’, it was a good place to raise a family. And for Barty, it was like the closing of a circle. In his 1939 recollections for The Sydney Morning Herald he described a rural idyll at Coodra Vale, a perfect picture of the bush that reflected the memories of his own childhood home at beloved Illalong:

  As the sun was setting, the lyre-birds came out of their fastness and called to each other across the valley, imitating everything they had ever heard. Gorgeous [lorikeets] came and sat in rows on the spouting that ran around the verandah, protesting shrilly when their tails were pulled by the children. Bower birds with an uncanny scent for fruit would come hurrying up from the end of the garden when the housewife started to peel apples, and would sit on the window-sill of the kitchen, looking expectantly into the room.

  But the beginning of their first summer there was anything but idyllic. In December it was already unbearably hot and rain was a distant memory. On 3 January, a hot wind swept in from the west, raising a thick cloud of fine, blinding dust. A small fire that broke out near Mount Barren Jack was fanned by the dusty wind and before long the flames were galloping across the paddocks, turning dry grass to ash. Soon the fire ran into the bush an
d that night the hills were alight in a red line more than 30 kilometres long.

  As the fire bore down, families wrapped their children in wet blankets and ran for their lives, leaving all they owned behind. The air was thick with smoke and the sun blazed orange in a hot, dirty sky until it seemed as if the whole world was burning. It was a fire that only nature could stop. By 5 January, it was burning on Coodra Vale. Luckily, the Patersons were not there but a party of visiting anglers had to leap into the river for shelter, leaving their sulkies to burn on the bank.

  The next day, the weather finally changed and a light but consistent rain fell. It was not enough to quench the fire but it was enough to halt its advance and the worst was over. Left behind was a blackened scar of ruined homes, dead trees, flattened fences and charred animals, their scorched carcasses still smoking in the ash.

  In hindsight, the Patersons might have seen the fire as an omen for their experiment on the land but they were determined to make a go of Coodra Vale, and to provide the rural life they wanted for their children. Besides, Barty still hoped the new surroundings would inspire some good writing. He did find time to write, producing a lengthy treatise on a subject close to his heart, Racehorses and Racing. This guide to the sport of kings provided its author with personal satisfaction but it held little commercial appeal and to Paterson’s disappointment it was not published in his lifetime. However, his experiences at Coodra Vale had long term spinoffs when he published ‘The Mountain Squatter’ in 1915. Described as one of Paterson’s finest ballads, it as an ode to sheep and the clever ‘collie pup’ that rounds them up. It finishes with a sentiment familiar to any stockman who has owned a good working dog: ‘The cash ain’t coined to buy/That little collie pup.’

  The family’s life on the land did not mean they were cut off from the finer things. Although not wealthy, they lived as ‘gentlemen squatters’ and frequently travelled to Sydney for sporting and social events. On 10 April 1909, they went to the races at Randwick and a week later they were guests at a vice-regal ball, hosted by Lord and Lady Dudley, at Government House in Sydney. Beautiful, charming and fiercely determined to get whatever she wanted, Lady Dudley had a special cause—to set up a network of bush nurses to provide care to the poor and isolated across Australia. The scheme was hotly opposed by country doctors, but Lady Dudley was equally intent on making it happen. Soon after the ball at Government House, she summonsed Paterson to a meeting to ask for his help:

  You are well known among the bush people and I want you to organise a trip for me through all the back-blocks towns. I will live in the Governor-General’s train, and I will address meetings and ask for subscriptions in every centre, even in the small places. I will get £20,000 without any trouble. Will you help me to do it?

  Paterson admired her pluck, but was disturbed by the thought of her speaking night after night ‘in smelly little country halls with the thermometer at a hundred and ten’. He knew Lady Dudley’s plan would fail because the local doctor in each of those towns would pressure wealthy people not to donate. As it happened, the tour never took place, although Lady Dudley did manage to get nurses working in some parts of the country. Paterson felt ashamed at not taking part in the scheme but it was not the last time his path would cross with Lady Dudley’s.

  In August, Barty and Alice returned to Sydney to attend the funeral of Barty’s grandmother Emily ‘Mama’ Barton, who had died at Rockend at the age of ninety-one. Newspaper obituaries recalled her ‘exciting experiences’ when the Aborigines from the Yass district had invaded Boree Nyrang station some sixty years earlier. She was buried in a plot she had chosen next to the family vault at St Anne’s churchyard in Ryde. A poem that she wrote remains as testament to the love that she felt for her children and grandchildren and to the importance of her waterside home as a hub for her far-flung family:

  When to this my cottage home,

  Sons from far stations come;

  When each well-known voice I hear,

  Speaking words of hearty cheer

  And the sunburnt hands I hold

  Or the stalwart frames unfold

  While loving looks around I see

  Life has still charms for me.

  In January the next year, Barty and Alice had their own brush with death. Two years after the region was ravaged by fire, the fickle summer weather delivered devastating flash floods. The Patersons, with Alice’s brother Douglas Walker, were attempting to cross the Murrumbidgee River when a wave of dirty water roared down the narrow valley. The buggy was swept away and its occupants hurled into the torrent. Alice and her brother clung to branches to keep their heads above water while Barty bravely climbed on to the backs of the terrified horses and cut them loose from the buggy. Horses and humans made it to safety but the buggy surged downstream and its owners never saw it again.

  There was a certain irony in Paterson’s alarming encounters with the elements in a land he loved so much. More than twenty years earlier, inspired by his passion for the upper Murrumbidgee, he had written ‘A Mountain Station’—a wry ballad that cited the misfortunes of a squatter who took a chance on a high-country property:

  I bought a run a while ago,

  On country rough and ridgy,

  Where wallaroos and wombats grow—

  The Upper Murrumbidgee.

  The grass was rather scant, it’s true,

  But this a fair exchange is,

  The sheep can see a lovely view

  By climbing up the ranges.

  The mountain squatter in the poem went the way of many before him. His sheep were eaten by dingoes or stolen by the neighbours and his cattle were swept away in a flood. Paterson undoubtedly hoped life would not imitate art and that his mountain station would be a success. But like the fictional squatter, the Patersons were besieged by dingoes that defied a so-called dog-proof fence and the volatile mountain rivers varied from raging flood to sullen sluggishness, depending on the rain—or lack of it.

  Coodra Vale was not a financial success and, like his parents before him, Paterson learned the hard way that farming was a good way of turning a small fortune into an even smaller one. The fictional mountain squatter in the ballad sold his troublesome property and, in late 1911, the Patersons did the same when Barty agreed to hand over his share of the station to his partners.

  But the failure at Coodra Vale had not extinguished his dream of a life on the land. In March 1912, the family moved north to a smaller property at Bimbi, south-west of Grenfell in central-western New South Wales. Their new station, Glen Esk, had a picturesque homestead surrounded by vines and fruit trees. In wet years, a shallow lagoon in front of the house filled with water, attracting hundreds of water birds and other creatures. When the family arrived, however, the region was in the grip of yet another drought and the lagoon was probably no more than a dusty depression lined with thirsty trees.

  The Patersons continued their gentleman squatter lifestyle and were often absent from the new home. In April they were among a big crowd who rugged up in cool weather to enjoy the races at Randwick and in May they travelled to the central-west town of Forbes for the Picnic Race Club ball at the town hall. They were back in Sydney in July, again rubbing shoulders with the governor when he hosted a party for 200 children at Rose Bay. A month later, the Patersons attended a ball on board the P & O Company’s luxury cruise ship, the SS Medina. On this glittering occasion, the ship was decorated with bunting, palms and coloured lights, and the cream of Sydney society danced on the promenade deck.

  It might have been Paterson’s attendance at such events that prompted Perth’s Daily News to describe him at around this time as a ‘stout, staid Tory’ who was no longer the lively bohemian of his youth. It was a bit unfair. Certainly, the middle-aged Paterson was no longer an angry young man and he was undoubtedly quite comfortable in society’s upper levels, but that did not necessarily mean he was disengaged from the country people, about whom he had written so much. In August, he and Alice returned to Bimbi to attend
a plain and fancy dress ball. They shared a fine supper with the locals, some of whom wore their most imaginative costumes. Among the revellers were gypsies, soldiers and native Americans. One brave gentleman came dressed as a ‘half woman and half man’.

  The fun of the ball masked the hard times for the local farmers. The drought continued to bite, a problem that hit the Patersons just as hard as their neighbours. Sheep died and wheat yields were poor. Then things took an even worse turn when careless picnickers started a fire in the nearby Weddin Mountains in January 1913. The fire burnt for about two weeks, reaching Glen Esk by month’s end. Paterson is thought to have been among about a hundred men who helped to stop the flames from reaching the village of Bimbi.

  The family stuck it out at Glen Esk for a few more months. In April, Barty was appointed as a horse judge at the Grenfell Show—probably his last public function in the district. By October, the family was on holiday in Camden near Sydney and, in November, they attended a party at Yaralla, the grand home of Alice’s aunt, the millionaire philanthropist Eadith Walker. By then, the experiment in life on the land was over and they moved back to familiar surroundings at Woollahra. Although their time at Bimbi was not a financial success, it is credited with inspiring some of Paterson’s later poems, including ‘Song of the Wheat’ and ‘Whisper from the Bland’.

  Despite the failure of their farming ventures, they were financially secure enough for Barty to make a living as a freelance journalist while completing his treatise on racing. There followed a quiet period in the family’s lives. Nobody, of course, could have known that the assassination of an obscure aristocrat thousands of kilometres away would soon plunge the world into turmoil.

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