by Paul Terry
He also spoke of the indigenous Australians in his wireless talks. In a broadcast entitled ‘Our Earliest Inhabitants’, he showed admiration for people whom he thought had been given ‘a very rough spin by their chroniclers’. He spoke of meeting an Aboriginal tribe in the Northern Territory and only realising later that he had observed a people living under an ancient and effective social system. Perhaps with fond thoughts in mind of Fanny, his childhood nurse, he was pleased to offer a ‘few kind words’ on behalf of a maligned race and noted that while their traditional culture was unsuited to modern civilisation, the people he saw in the Territory that day were enterprising and successful, and ‘there seemed to be a reason for everything they did, a reason not always apparent on the surface’.
The radio was a good way of reaching a far-flung audience, but his thoughts were rarely far from books and publishing. In May 1932, he spoke at a meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in Sydney. He gave some good advice to his fellow writers; if they wanted financial success, they should stifle dreams of genius and consider only the psychology of their readers. ‘The reading public has its fashions in books, just as the female population has its fashions in dress,’ he said:
At the moment the fashion is for ‘thrillers’ or detective stories. The popularity of this type of book is attributable to an inherited instinct. In cave-man days the murder of a member of the tribe would get everybody wild with excitement, and if the cause of the murder was a mystery, no member of the tribe would sleep soundly at night till the mystery was cleared up.
For this reason, Paterson added, modern civilised men ‘from judges downward’ would sit up half the night reading a detective story.
There were some trends in literature of which he was less approving. Although stories with a well-managed love interest were acceptable, the same could not be said for ‘risqué matter’. Never one to mine this particular vein, Paterson felt there were already too many of these saucy books on the market and the theme was growing threadbare. But he was on more solid ground when he urged the gathered authors to write about what they knew best. ‘If,’ he said, ‘you think you know how to manage a milk-run better than anyone else, set it down: it will be of interest.’
Meanwhile, he was continuing to write about what he knew best. Even though he had now lived most of his adult life in Sydney, he had not lost touch with the bush. In 1933, he brought this love of the land to life with his first book for children, The Animals Noah Forgot. Illustrated by Norman Lindsay, the book was a series of charming verses about Australian animals, as told by a koala and a platypus to a visiting English swan.
All sorts of animals familiar to Australian children starred in the book. Among them was Weary Will the Wombat:
He digs his homestead underground
He’s neither shrewd nor clever
For kangaroos can leap and bound
But wombats dig forever.
There was also Old Man Platypus, who drifted down the river ‘where the reed beds sweep and shiver’, and some emus who formed a football team that played against a team of kangaroos, wallabies and wallaroos. It was Paterson’s first publication for several years and its arrival was widely welcomed. Many were as delighted with Lindsay’s drawings as they were with Paterson’s words, but most agreed the book was a good buy at half a crown. One critic, writing under the pen-name of ‘Mulga’ in Rockhampton’s Central Queensland Herald, paid Paterson a backhanded compliment in a mixed review:
One has to admit that some of the verse borders very close to doggerel, but Banjo always had a habit of writing good verse or bad doggerel, and these verses with their short lines and simple words will certainly appeal to children.
Paterson might not have disagreed with ‘Mulga’ on the first point but was surely pleased that the second point proved true. Children did enjoy the book and families across Australia cheerfully parted with their half-crowns, ensuring the book was a big seller at Christmas that year. Among the many children who enjoyed The Animals Noah Forgot were members of Paterson’s own family. His daughter Grace had delivered Barty and Alice’s first grandchild, Eadith Rosamund, that year and, while it would be several years until she would be old enough to enjoy her grandfather’s work, Paterson’s nephew Andrew Taylor was lucky enough to get an advance copy of the book in his Christmas stocking. Inscribed inside the cover were the words: ‘With best wishes, uncle and aunt A.B. and Alice Paterson, Xmas 1932.’
In February 1934, Paterson quietly celebrated his seventieth birthday. Always reluctant to share his private life with the public, he might have preferred that the newspapers did not mention the milestone in their gossip snippets and he did not give any interviews. The papers had to be content with observing that ‘Banjo’ was now living quietly after a series of adventures. As for the man himself, perhaps he spared a quiet moment to reflect on the changes he had seen in seven decades. As cars and buses rumbled through the busy streets of Sydney, his thoughts might have turned to the days when brumbies roamed the hills and bullock drivers battered their way through flood and drought. And, although his days of camping in the bush were over, he may well have spared a fond memory or two for Clancy’s ‘sunlit plains extended’ or the clear mountain air of the Snowy River, where ‘the white stars fairly blaze’.
With some of those memories in mind, he was putting the final touches on a personal project—his autobiographical observations, Happy Dispatches, published in 1934. He had first floated the idea of using his diary entries to write ‘a rather amusing book of travel’ in 1901 and had further discussed the idea with Norman Lindsay in following years. Lindsay agreed the diary entries were ‘too good to throw away in talk’ but Paterson felt he had too much, rather than too little, information for a book. Lindsay advised him to ‘write everything in and then sub it out if you must’. Paterson took the advice and a few days before his birthday in 1934—despite still being unsure what to title the book—he was sending chapters to Angus & Robertson.
Eventually, ‘Happy Dispatches’ was chosen as the title over alternatives such as the rather dreary ‘Famous Folk at Close Range’; the ambiguous ‘All Nurses Swear’; and the forbidding ‘Strictly Private’. The title mattered little in the end as the book was not a great commercial success. Although the critics were generally kind to the work, it largely failed to connect with a Depression-era readership still nostalgic for Paterson’s great works. Its true worth became obvious in later years, however, as an important personal account of Paterson’s life as seen through the famous people he met and for that, Banjo fans are surely grateful.
Paterson continued to write through the thirties, albeit at the leisurely pace due to the elderly. He enjoyed spending time with his family and rarely missed a race meeting of significance. At other times, he could be seen relaxing at the Australian Club, smoking a pipe and enjoying a friendly game of bridge with other gentlemen of status and refinement.
In 1935, Paterson was immortalised on canvas when his portrait was painted by Sir John Longstaff. The poet and the painter had a lot in common. Both were raised in the bush at about the same time, were physically fit and moved easily in society’s upper echelons. They also shared a link to the late Henry Lawson. In 1900, commissioned by none other than Archibald of The Bulletin, Longstaff had painted Lawson’s portrait in oil. The work expertly captured the essence of the tortured poet. His face and right hand, holding a pipe, emerge from an inky backdrop that seems to sum up the pall of the gloom that sometimes enveloped him, while the shadows in his eyes hint at the demons that lurked there. Archibald was so pleased with his commission that he was moved to establish the great portrait prize in his name.
Paterson’s heart gave him trouble as he aged and he spent some time in hospital shortly before his portrait was painted. Once recovered, however, he enjoyed his own experience with Longstaff. In an unpublished script for his ABC wireless program, Paterson later wrote that the ‘wiry and energetic’ Longstaff worked at a rapid pace in a large studio, never sitti
ng down and constantly revising his work:
Having posed his sitter, he goes back to the far corner of the room and studies his subject. Then he dashes at the easel and paints feverishly for a moment. Then he dashes back again to the end of the room, compares the sitter with the work on the easel, and then makes another dash at the picture. All told, he must walk miles while painting a portrait . . . At the end of a two hours’ sitting, he suggested that I, as the sitter, must be tired, but I replied: ‘Well, if you can stand running a footrace for two hours, I can stand here watching you.’
The completed painting of Paterson showed the poet looking every bit his seventy-one years but nonetheless erect and full of life. In an appropriate close of the circle between Paterson, Lawson and Archibald, Longstaff ’s portrait of ‘Banjo’ beat more than 120 entrants to win the 1935 Archibald Prize, netting the artist £430.
Despite his advancing years, Paterson continued to work. His racing stories were widely read in the newspapers but he also had his mind on his latest book, a novel about racing called The Shearer’s Colt. Released in 1936, it told the story of Hilton Fitzroy, the son of an English gentleman who experiences a spot of bother and is packed off to Australia to make something of himself. The fictional Fitzroy, who seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Paterson’s one-time friend Harry Morant, has a series of adventures on Australian racetracks before returning to England in the company of some new friends and Sensation, the shearer’s colt of the title.
The book met mixed reviews. Melbourne’s The Argus said it was ‘a fine Australian novel’ but Adelaide’s The Advertiser thought it was ‘a rambling and rather improbable tale, peopled by puppets’. Country town newspapers were more lavish in their praise but, balanced against that, the book came in for stinging criticism from an unlikely source, the Hebrew Standard of Australasia. A writer for that publication, Catherine Lindsay, was appalled by the book’s portrayal of Jews in London. Although she admitted her feelings were coloured after supposedly hearing Paterson refer to Jews as ‘Yids’ in a slighting tone at a Fellowship of Australian Writers’ Luncheon, she was scathing in her opinion of The Shearer’s Colt.
Cheap sneers and badly drawn characters should be unworthy of one whose verse appears in our school readers and has to be learnt by all children—Jews and Gentiles alike. The ‘Banjo’s’ new strings are made of cheap gut and are not worthy of the instrument to which they are fitted.
She might have taken some satisfaction in learning that The Shearer’s Colt was not a strong seller, despite its price of just six shillings. This relative failure must have come as a disappointment to Paterson, who had just published his final book. Now aged seventy-two, he was entering his twilight years and he could take comfort in knowing that his greatest works had already been established as the stuff of legend. Ahead lay more travel and personal rewards, but the land of which he had sung had changed forever.
*
In March 1938, Paterson and his wife Alice took a holiday in Tasmania. They stayed in Hobart, visiting the pretty Derwent-side town of New Norfolk to the city’s north, and made a trip to the hamlet of Ouse on the edge of the rugged highlands to the northwest. As part of the visit, Paterson was a guest at a Hobart boys’ school. During an address to the students, he spoke of the best book, the best man and the best woman he had known. His choice of best book went to Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (a difficult book, Paterson said, but one that rewarded those who could master it); the best man honours were shared by Lord Roberts and Rudyard Kipling; and, showing he could still look to the future and not just the past, Paterson’s choice of best woman was Marie Curie for her discovery of radium. As he left the school, the boys burst into a rendition of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in his honour.
The year of 1939 was an eventful one for the Paterson family. On New Year’s Day, Barty was presented with a CBE from the King in recognition of his services to literature. Similar awards went to the essayist Professor Walter Murdoch and Mrs Aeneas Gunn, author of We of the Never Never. Paterson’s CBE surely pleased his establishment soul but, as ever, he was outwardly modest about it.
The Mercury in Hobart reported that a twinkle in Paterson’s eye gave away his pride in his achievement but he was quoted as saying that he saw the award as recognition for all Australian writers, and not as a personal accolade. Brisbane’s Courier-Mail was more effusive, saying the CBE was long overdue ‘but at least it has been bestowed worthily’. In rather loftier terms, The Sydney Morning Herald agreed, saying the ‘Commonwealth [had done] well to recommend Royal recognition of the writers who interpret the life and spirit of this land’.
The shadows were now growing long for A.B. Paterson, but he kept busy as his seventy-fifth birthday approached. He had been penning his series of memoirs for The Sydney Morning Herald and the first was published on 4 February. The stories, which ran weekly, are regarded as unreliable and contradictory with Paterson unwilling or unable to check some of his facts, but the series was nonetheless an entertaining insight into history seen through the prism of an old man’s memories. At about the same time as the first article was published Barty and Alice arrived in Melbourne for a short stay en route to another holiday in Tasmania.
They sailed from Melbourne on the Taroona, arriving in Launceston on 11 February. There, Paterson chatted about Tasmanian racing with local journalists and said he intended to visit the city’s racetrack and stables. A few days later, the couple took a leisurely trip to the state’s south, celebrating Barty’s birthday on the way to Hobart. After a couple of weeks in the southern capital, he returned to the highland town of Ouse where The Mercury photographed him getting a lesson in fly-casting for trout. In the autumn, they returned to Sydney. Barty Paterson had taken his last long journey.
There was more baby joy for the Patersons when their second granddaughter, Philippa, was born in December 1939. With her older sister, Rosamund, Philippa would compile the twin volumes of Paterson’s complete works, Singer of the Bush and Song of the Pen, published in 1983. At the time of Philippa’s birth, the Patersons lived next door to their daughter’s family. The granddaughters wrote in their introduction to their 1983 works that Paterson was ‘remembered as a splendid grandfather’ who greatly enjoyed reading aloud to the girls.
The family had some luck in June. A wealthy relative of Alice’s, Thomas Walker, had died, leaving an estate of £400,000. Advertisements calling for claimants to the estate were placed in newspapers around the world. A total of 650 people made claims and thirty-three were successful. Among them were ‘titled people in England and Scotland’ as well as members of the Walker family in New South Wales. Alice Paterson, née Walker, was among the thirty-three claimants who each received a sum of £12,000. It was a windfall that provided the family with a level of wealth that Paterson’s artistic success could not deliver.
After a lifetime of hard work, Barty and Alice Paterson might have expected to enjoy their remaining years in comfort with their extended family—but the world was changing again, and this time the changes would be catastrophic. At a quarter past nine on the evening of 3 September, Australians huddled around their wirelesses to hear the scratchy tones of Prime Minister Robert Menzies confirming their worst fears. ‘Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.’
If the Patersons were among the millions of Australians listening to the radio that night, their thoughts undoubtedly turned to their son Hugh, now thirty-three and of fighting age, and to their naval reserve officer son-in-law Kenneth Harvie. Of all the family, only Barty had seen the horrors of war firsthand, but all must have been aware that their young men might well be called upon to fight. These fears were soon realised. Kenneth, the naval officer, served in Australian waters throughout the war while Hugh Paterson became one of the famous Rats of Tobruk.
*
T
he world watched and trembled in May 1940 when the German army thundered into Belgium and then France, crushing all opposition and forcing the British into the humiliating evacuation of their troops at Dunkirk. For people of Paterson’s generation, the German blitzkrieg brought back alarming memories of the Great War. Many men who had fought in the first war were now asked to fight again. Old men like Paterson could do little except pray for the safety of their sons.
It might have been some comfort to Paterson that ‘Waltzing Matilda’ had leapt into popularity as a patriotic war tune. A big London music studio was producing thousands of recordings of the song. The record’s cover was illustrated with a photograph of the Second Australian Imperial Force marching through Sydney and the song was a hit at camp concerts. The ‘old junk’ that Paterson had sold a decade earlier was on its way to becoming the most famous Australian song of all.
That year, Paterson wrote ‘The Dry Canteen’, a verse put to sheet music, and it was published in March. Also in that year he wrote ‘Song of Murray’s Brigade’, a whimsical if not very good reflection on the thoughts of soldiers serving far from home. These works were his swansongs. His heart had continued to cause problems and he had been told to take things quietly. In January 1941, he was admitted to a private hospital in Sydney. On 5 February, while sitting in a chair at the hospital waiting for Alice to take him home, he took his last breaths and died quietly, away from the gaze of the public. Australia had lost the man who had defined the essence of a nation in verse. Even though his work would live on, it had delivered little financial reward. Paterson left just £225 in his will.
The public reaction to the death of ‘The Banjo’ was heartfelt, if a little muted. He would perhaps have preferred it that way. But a friend and journalistic colleague, G.A. King, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald that Paterson would be remembered as a great Australian who loved his country. It did not matter, wrote King, whether Paterson was in the shearing shed, fishing in the Snowy River or playing on the polo field, ‘Barty was always a fine fellow’.