Banjo

by Paul Terry

  In Happy Dispatches, Paterson remembered the trainee pilots were encouraged to fly close to objects on the ground. One young pilot, who had a natural gift for f lying, got things terribly wrong when he swooped on an Egyptian man who was fishing in the canal. The plane’s undercarriage struck the fisherman and killed him:

  Then the young boy lost his head and after landing his plane by the side of the canal he set off to walk blindly across the desert. The flying people had a nice problem on their hands—an abandoned plane by the side of the canal, a fisherman with his head smashed to pieces in a boat and beyond that, nothing. Sherlock Holmes would have been puzzled.

  The young pilot, still dazed, later walked into an army camp to face the music. The Royal Air Force conducted a quick court martial and came up with a practical punishment. The pilot was confined to camp but allowed to keep flying. Paterson noted: ‘One life doesn’t matter much in a war, and the army couldn’t afford to lose the services of a pilot with the big move just ahead.’

  There were also lighter moments. Paterson, who was promoted to major in October, had an Australian’s slightly cynical view of senior officers. He remembered that some ninety generals had gathered at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo where they ‘ just existed beautifully or they made themselves busy about such jobs as reporting on the waste of jam tins’. There was not much room at the hotel for junior officers and none at all for non-commissioned officers or enlisted men. The troops—aggrieved at being barred from breathing the same air as the generals—rioted one night outside the hotel in protest. The riot did not achieve much in the way of achieving equality, but it did provide a salutary lesson for two Australian officers that their troops expected a fair go.

  The two officers had bought a car, which they planned to drive to the pyramids with ‘some female youth and beauty on board’. Reluctant to abandon dinner with their lady companions, the officers opted not to go outside and quell the riot, and instead enjoyed their meal washed down with some fine cognac. Eventually, the well-fed foursome ventured outside to discover that of 300 cars in the vicinity, the rioters had chosen to burn only one. That, of course, was the car belonging to the amorous officers. It is not known what the now car-less officers did for the rest of the evening but it is unlikely that they enjoyed a romantic evening in the moon-shadows of the pyramids.

  True to form, Paterson was heavily involved in unit sporting contests and naturally many of these events revolved around horses. It was his idea to stage rough-riding displays at the depot and these rodeos on the edge of the Egyptian desert attracted plenty of interest from military and social worthies. On 10 November 1916, Lady McMahon, wife of the High Commissioner of Egypt, attended one such competition and, according to the unit’s war diary, ‘she was very much interested’ in the display of horsemanship.

  Paterson helped his men to more victories in sporting events over the following year. In March 1917, he wrote to his publisher, George Robertson, describing the rough-and-ready nature of his men. The letter revealed that the unit’s daily work was ‘hard, monotonous and dangerous’ but Major Paterson’s pride in his men comes through, albeit with a little interstate one-upmanship:

  I don’t think the world ever saw such a lot of horsemen got together as I have in my squadron—Queensland horsebreakers and buckjumping-show riders from New South Wales. It is queer to notice the difference in the various States—the other squadron are Victorian, Tasmanian and South Australian farmers and they are quite a different type from my lot . . . not having had the real rough horses to deal with they cannot touch my men at horse work.

  At the time of writing, more than ten of Paterson’s men were in hospital with serious injuries such as broken legs and crushed ankles. Despite the risks, none of the men ever had to be told twice to mount a hostile horse—‘in fact they dearly like to do a bit of “grandstand” work even though they risk their necks by it’. In this small way, the horsemen of Paterson’s Remount Squadron were doing their bit to win the war.

  While Paterson was busy in Egypt, his publishers back home in Australia were capitalising on enduring public interest in his work. In March, Angus & Robertson released Saltbush Bill J.P. and Other Verses, a collection of Paterson’s works that included ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘A Dream of the Melbourne Cup’. The newspapers lauded the works and noted that they would be well received by the men in the trenches. The Sydney-based sporting publication, Referee, hoped the verses would bring smiles to the faces of the soldiers.

  No doubt many copies of it will help to swell future mails to the men at the front. Possibly for trench reading (difficult and dodgy work at best), nothing could be much better than short, cheerful scraps that breathe the atmosphere of home, and of those there are plenty in Saltbush Bill, J.P. The book is nicely printed, strongly bound, and of just the size to be tucked handily away in a tunic pocket.

  In October, Three Elephant Power, a book of ten Paterson short stories, including the titular account inspired by the famous Sydney to Melbourne motoring endurance run of 1905, arrived in stores. It, too, was praised by the papers and hailed as a welcome distraction for the troops. By this time, however, things had changed rather dramatically for Paterson and his men, thanks to the arrival in June of a new commanding officer of the British forces in Egypt.

  The impressive General Edmund Henry Hynman Allenby—later Lord Allenby—had fought in the Boer War where he became acquainted with Paterson. Early in 1900, Allenby—then a mere major—had been about to walk into an officers’ mess in South Africa where the occupants were the worse for too much rum. Paterson had intercepted the burly Allenby and informed him that the officers in the mess were drinking his health. ‘That’s no excuse for keeping the whole camp awake,’ said Allenby. ‘You tell them to be in bed with all lights out, in five minutes, or I’ll have to do something about it.’ Allenby was not a man to be disobeyed and the party was over for the rum-soaked officers.

  Paterson found Allenby to be just as forceful when he visited the depot at Moascar in 1917, but now he had bitter personal experience and a general’s clout to back it up. He had led a cavalry division on the Western Front, overseeing the carnage of Mons, Ypres and the Somme. Just prior to his arrival in Egypt, he had learned that his artillery officer son Michael had been killed in the fighting. Allenby was a changed man when he arrived in Egypt—‘a great lonely figure of a man, riding silently in front of an obviously terrified staff ’. He was there to shake things up. There would be no more shenanigans such as the staging of riots and the burning of motor cars, and Paterson’s roughriders knew immediately that this particular general was not to be defied.

  The men christened Allenby ‘The Bull’—a nickname that stuck for life. And like a bull, the general immediately let everyone know he was boss. He dispersed the generals at Shepheard’s Hotel and, for good measure he moved the Remount headquarters from its comfortable surroundings to a camp 150 miles (2414 kilometres) closer to the front, where the British were fighting the Turks in Palestine. Moving an army closer to a war was an obvious choice for the general. ‘We’re a bit too far from our work here,’ he said. ‘I’d like to get up closer where I can get a look at the enemy occasionally.’

  The Bull went about picking his key officers with ruthless precision. He gave them one chance to prove themselves and if they passed muster they were given a bigger job to do. There was much debate about which general should lead the Mounted Division for the Middle Eastern campaign. Henry Chauvel—an Australian and a veteran of the Boer War and Gallipoli—was a frontrunner, but some in British high command did not fancy giving such an important job to a mere colonial. Besides, said one crusty brigadier, the Australian was ‘such a sticky old frog’.

  Sticky or not, Chauvel got the job—although many of his peers expected him to fail. At this time, Barty Paterson travelled by train with an Australian general to the front at Beersheba. The general, whom Paterson did not identify, expected to be given command of the cavalry when Chauvel failed. ‘This chap Chau
vel,’ the general said, ‘he’s too damned slow. I’ve just come along to see how things turn out.’ Predictions of the demise of the sticky old frog proved premature. On 31 October, British forces overran the Turkish trenches in the ancient town of Beersheba and the men and horses of the Australian Light Horse Brigade charged their way into military history.

  By then, the horses had not been watered for more than seventy hours. Success had depended on reaching deep wells in Beersheba and, after the Turks were overrun, Chauvel led his men into the town, where the enemy had left bombs buried in the sand. Paterson saw a man blown to pieces when he triggered one of these booby traps. But Chauvel raced on, pursuing the Turks after giving the horses a much-needed drink. Later that day, Paterson saw the general who had wanted Chauvel’s job ‘walking disconsolately through the streets of Beersheba. Marius among the ruins of Carthage was nothing to it’.

  Later, Paterson was among a group that collected a battalion of Turkish prisoners in the Jordan Valley. These were the first Turks he had met. Until then, he had imagined a Turk as a paunchy person ‘who lounged under a tree, while his wives fanned him and filled him with sherbet’. But, showing the same humanity towards the enemy as he had towards the Boers seventeen years earlier, Paterson in fact saw the Turkish soldiers as people in need of help.

  In Happy Dispatches, he wrote that the prisoners were shabby and exhausted. They had not eaten in three days. Their colonel said nothing except to refuse food until his men were fed. This colonel, said Paterson, would have won respect in any officers’ mess in the world. Despite their bitter fighting, neither the British nor the Australians had any grudge against the ‘Jackos’ and the prisoners were provided with food and tobacco. Men who had been trying to kill each other days earlier now ate and smoked together in a desert that had soaked up the bloodshed of war for millennia.

  In September, Alice Paterson received terrible news from France. Her brother Douglas, who had been with the Patersons when they survived the flood in the Murrumbidgee River eight years earlier, was fighting as a machine gunner when a bomb exploded. His brother Harold, who was fighting nearby, rushed to be by his side but thirty-four-year-old Douglas was already dead. He was buried at Maricourt. The war had less than three months to run when he was killed.

  Back in Egypt, Barty Paterson was kept busy managing the transport of horses, but he had found time to write a few ‘jingles’ which, characteristically, he felt were unsatisfactory. ‘A Grain of Desert Sand’, written in that year, reflected on the timelessness of ancient Egypt, ‘The Army Mules’, published in March, paid tribute to the ‘rankless, thankless man who hustles the army mules’, and the brief ‘Moving On’, published in May, was a soldier’s lament at the restlessness of war.

  The British won the campaign in the Middle East, but the killing continued in Europe, right up until the guns finally fell silent on 11 November, and a battered world celebrated the end of what everyone hoped would be the last global war. By early 1919, the work for Paterson and his men in Egypt had petered out and it was almost time to go home. In April, Barty and Alice sailed from Egypt for Sydney. Their war was over.

  16

  AFTER THE WAR

  The Patersons arrived home in May 1919 to a joyful reunion with their children, now aged fifteen and thirteen. The family stayed for a short time at the home of Barty’s sister at Darling Point before moving back into their own home at Woollahra. During the journey home, Barty had completed a short novel called The Cook’s Dog. Apart from the adventures of the sheepdog of the title, the story told of an Australian girl who worked for a Lady Grizel Muckleston of the English aristocracy. The problem with the novel was that it was not very good, a fact which was not lost on the author. Later that year, he wrote to George Robertson saying he was ‘very dissatisfied with the thing’. Robertson was nothing if not honest and he bluntly replied that ‘you probably will do no better if you rewrite it till hell’s blue’. Accordingly, The Cook’s Dog was not published in Paterson’s lifetime.

  Barty and Alice, meanwhile, had picked up where they left off in Sydney. Barty was a frequent visitor to the races at Randwick and was a regular on the tennis courts at Double Bay. Although he was now fifty-five, he was as active as ever and the newspapers reported he was still a formidable foe with the racquet.

  Paterson resumed freelance journalism and travelled to the Tamworth district in June to report for Smith’s Weekly on the suitability of a proposed land subdivision to create soldier settlement blocks for returned servicemen. The post-war Australia on which he was now reporting was a very different place to the bushman days of his youth. Motor cars and trucks were steadily replacing the horse and many of the young men who had ‘humped their bluey’ across the wide brown land were now lying beneath the blasted earth of France and Belgium or the hard scrub of Gallipoli.

  In September 1919, Australia lost one of its great newspapermen when J.F. Archibald died at the age of sixty-three. Three years later, when Paterson became editor of The Sydney Sportsman, he wrote a fine tribute to his mentor, remembering him as the first Australian to call the English bluff. Archibald had the unusual idea for his time that an Australian doctor or lawyer or singer or actor was every bit as good as his counterpart from overseas, Paterson wrote. He was a provocateur who supported the underdog. He was a cynic and a pessimist but he always thought that Australians should believe in themselves. In short, Paterson wrote, the man who founded The Bulletin ‘made people think’. Almost a century after his death, Jules Francois Archibald still makes Australians think. One of his last acts was to bequeath money to a competition to find the best portrait painted of a distinguished Australian. The Archibald Prize is now Australia’s best-known art prize.

  At around the time of Archibald’s death, Paterson sold the film rights for ‘The Man From Snowy River’ for £100—a hefty sum believed to have been the largest book-to-film deal in Australia. The buyer was filmmaker Beaumont Smith, who began shooting the movie in the Cooma area later that year. Starring Cyril Mackay as the hero Jim Conroy, it reprised some of Paterson’s characters, including Kitty Carew, the love interest of the dastardly horse thief in the poem, ‘Conroy’s Gap’. The hero of the poem, the horse known as The Swagman, was the movie’s four-legged star.

  The silent black-and-white film—which has since been lost—starts with country boy Jim’s rather aimless life in the city. When he returns to the bush to work for a corrupt squatter, Jim falls in love with Kitty, who is played by Stella Southern—a former Sydney milliner who was plucked from obscurity to appear in the film. The squatter, Stingey Smith, conspires to release The Swagman into the bush to run with the brumbies, denying Jim the chance of winning enough money in a race to save Kitty’s family farm, thus delivering the farm to Smith. But Jim rescues the horse and rides him to victory while beating a false charge of theft. Ultimately, Jim and Kitty get married and live happily ever after.

  The film screened around the country in 1920. Ticket prices were set at a minimum of one shilling for adults. The promotional posters announced: ‘You’ve thrilled over the book—laughed, yes, and wept over it. Now see it magnificently visualised.’ Plenty of people did see it, and the reviews were kind. Perhaps with a sense of nostalgia for times that had passed, the newspapers lauded the film’s depiction of the bush and praised Cyril Mackay for playing an ‘everyday Australian doing interesting, plucky things’. The film won praise from Darwin to Hobart. In South Australia, The Register was especially delighted by the ‘Australian-ness’ of the production:

  Sheep in the paddocks, a season of drought, a mountain stream in a favoured district, a bushfire, a country race meeting, a mortgagee’s sale—all were there, and those who played the various parts were Australians, and looked it. The photographic work was magnificent, for the most interesting features of the bush and the life there were delineated. As with all Australian life, a horse took one of the principal parts, and its presence enabled a delightful country steeple chase meeting to be witnessed.


  Other newspapers expressed similar sentiments. In fact, almost everyone liked it, except for the man who inspired it. Soon after it was released, Paterson remarked: ‘What a pity they murdered the picture as they did.’

  Meanwhile, his family life was a source of contentment and he enjoyed watching the children grow into fine young people. In a letter to his niece in September, he revealed Hugh was taking a leadership role in the cadets at Sydney Grammar School and showed signs of being a good runner. Grace was also a fast runner and ‘quite clever’, while Alice was ‘fit and working very hard to keep the home together’.

  Paterson took over the editorship of The Sydney Sportsman in August 1922—a position he held for the next eight years. As its title suggests, it was a newspaper that focused entirely on Paterson’s passion for sport, and was well-suited to him personally. There was a strong emphasis on racing—the editor’s forte—but it also covered all of the major sports such as cricket, football and tennis as well as sailing and swimming. During this time, Paterson also covered weekend racing for the Sportsman’s stable mate, the Truth, and won praise for his insightful knowledge of racehorses and the people that surrounded them.

  That year, Australia lost another of its great figures when Henry Lawson’s destructive lifestyle finally got the better of him. Henry’s death on 2 September saddened the nation but it was not unexpected. He had lived his final years in predictable fashion, defying persistent efforts by his friends to save him.

  It was not that his early death was unavoidable. As late as 1916, newspaper colleagues had tried to beat his alcohol problem by sending him to a place where he supposedly could not get any. The new town of Leeton in the New South Wales’ Riverina had been declared a prohibition area because of the large number of men working on an irrigation scheme there. Henry, with Mrs Byers, was sent to Leeton in January. He would earn a small stipend in return for writing positive stories and poems about the new irrigation district, in hope of attracting settlers.