by Paul Terry
The Canberra Times said Paterson had bequeathed to Australians ‘a legacy and cheerfulness that will be the prize of generations yet unborn’ and The Worker in Brisbane said he would be remembered as a poet laureate of the outback. Even in far-away Perth, his passing was mourned. The West Australian said Banjo was not a great poet but his work would ensure the leather-skinned, hard-riding bushman would be remembered as the typical Australian, even in a nation that had traded the bush for the city in a time when the ‘gramophone, wireless and imported jazz music [had] created a drought in Australian spontaneity’.
Paterson’s death marked more than the passing of a beloved poet. He was among the last of the greats who had risen to fame in the tumult of the 1890s. The ‘bards of The Bulletin’ were almost gone. Henry Lawson was at peace at last and ‘Breaker’ Morant lay in his African grave. The memories of these men and their contemporaries would live on in a nation reluctant to break with the heritage that the poets had helped to create.
Many of the other players in the ‘Banjo’ story had also died. Some perished in obscurity. Christina Macpherson, who had provided a tune that would be known to all Australians, had died a spinster in 1936. She was buried at St Kilda cemetery and her grave was unmarked until 1994, when it was restored by members of the Macpherson family. Sarah Riley had left Australia for Scotland and England after the incident at Dagworth Station and did not return to Australia until 1930. Never married, she shared a large home at Panton Hill near Melbourne with her sister and a friend. The three ‘spinster ladies’ volunteered for good works, helping the Red Cross during the Great War and giving generously to philanthropic causes. Sarah died in August 1935.
Barty Paterson was buried in a private family service in Sydney. There was little or no press attention to the funeral—an appropriate farewell to a private man who was loved by many but was truly close to only a few. To his family, he was not a celebrity, but simply a much-loved husband, father and grandfather. It was fitting that in September, his son Hugh penned a poem of his own, ‘This Place They Call Tobruk’. The verses would surely have made his father proud. And, like his father’s greatest works, the son’s poem nicely incorporated the essence of Australia, with a twist of dry humour:
There’s places I’ve been in,
I didn’t like too well
New England’s far too blooming cold,
And Winton’s hot as hell
The Walgett beer is always warm,
In each there’s something crook
But each and all are perfect
To this place they call Tobruk.
Soon after Banjo’s death, the papers began to discuss a memorial to him. Writers suggested his childhood home at Illalong should be preserved in his honour. The idea was popular in the press, but the old house, although still standing, had been past its best when Rose Paterson had raised her family there and the years since had not been kind to it.
The house endured for another generation or so but eventually lost its battle with the elements, and its sagging remains had to be demolished. Not all was lost though; when her children were young, Rose Paterson had planted a tiny wisteria shrub next to the homestead’s rear verandah. The shrub grew strong and wide and, when the house was torn down, the wisteria was left in place. It now forms a huge, climbing outdoor shade area for the property’s current owners and remains a living link to the home that helped inspire some of Australia’s best-loved verses.
EPILOGUE
In 1946, the council for the New South Wales town of Orange formed a committee to investigate the possibility of developing a Banjo Paterson memorial at his birthplace of Narrambla. The following year, Paterson’s widow Alice, who had by then moved to Orange, unveiled an obelisk and plaque honouring her husband at the site. The homestead that had belonged to Paterson’s aunt, Rose Templer, had been demolished, but the crumbling ruins of the Templer family’s mill still dominated the shallow valley. The old kit home in which some believe Paterson was born had been moved to the top of a hill overlooking the homestead site. Several hundred people gathered by the roadside to see the unveiling of the monument, the first public structure erected in tribute to Australia’s famous poet.
Other honours soon followed. In the same year, the town of Yass began to discuss its own monument to Paterson in recognition of his childhood at Illalong. A bust of the poet’s head to be erected in the town’s central park was the favoured option and a plaster cast to make the bust was created. The idea faltered for a while, but in 1949 the cast was found in a farmer’s hayshed and a Sydney sculptor was commissioned to make the statue from bronze. By 1950, the park had been renamed the Banjo Paterson Memorial Park and, in November, Alice Paterson visited the town to witness the unveiling of the bust.
Paterson was given national recognition in 1968 when he was included in a select list of Australians to be featured on a postage stamp. Twenty-five years later, he was pictured in profile on the ten-dollar note. Also on the note is a horseman cracking a stockwhip and some lines from ‘The Man From Snowy River’. Earlier editions of the ten-dollar note had depicted Henry Lawson, but it is Banjo who survives today on the currency. It is fitting that the duelling poets who had seen the bush through such different eyes shared the same honour.
But Paterson’s real memorial lives on in the words that he wrote. Today, schoolchildren around the country are still taught about ‘The Man From Snowy River’ and Australians everywhere recognise the stirring opening words: ‘There was movement at the station/ For the word had passed around . . .’ Even those who cannot recite the words might appreciate Clancy’s ‘vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended’, while city dwellers do not have to venture far from the bright lights to see ‘the glory of the everlasting stars’. Drovers today may be few and far between, but hardy men and women, with their loyal dogs and horses, still drive their cattle along the ‘long paddock’ and enjoy pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
Ironically, however, it was the work that gave Paterson the least reward that still delights us most today. Only in Australia could a song about a suicidal swagman be officially considered as a national anthem but, in 1974, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ came second behind ‘Advance Australia Fair’ in a national poll to choose a replacement for ‘God Save the Queen’. Regardless, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ remains the song that Australians choose when they want to express national pride.
In 1995, when Prime Minister Paul Keating addressed a crowd at Winton, Queensland, on the accepted hundred-year anniversary of the song’s creation, he described ‘Waltzing Matilda’ as a tale of class struggle, born in a time of drought and conflict. It is unlikely its author saw it that way, but Paterson would surely have taken pride in Keating’s statement that his simple little song had ‘caused more smiles and tears, and more hairs to stand up on the back of more Australian necks than any other thing of three minutes’ duration in Australia’s history’.
At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was played when Australian athletes stood on the dais. At the closing ceremony of the 1956 Melbourne Games, the song was performed with rewritten words, ‘Farewell Olympians’, prompting The Argus to declare it the perfect end to the best games ever. In the same year, a French band struck up ‘Waltzing Matilda’ when Prime Minister Robert Menzies laid a wreath to honour fallen soldiers in Paris. The French musicians thought the song of the swagman was Australia’s real national anthem. It was Paterson’s best-known legacy.
Three years before his death, Paterson wrote a short piece entitled ‘Looking Backward’ for The Sydney Mail. In it, he compared himself unfavourably to Rudyard Kipling and Adam Lindsay Gordon, and said he never aimed high; he just wrote about what he knew. Such was the inspiration for his work. As for how that work would be remembered, Paterson was as modest as ever. He wrongly predicted a short future for Australia’s greatest bush poems but correctly observed that he and Henry Lawson were in the right place at the right time to create words that might live on while ever Austral
ians stand under the Southern Cross.
Our ‘ruined rhymes’ are not likely to last long, but if there is any hope at all of survival it comes from the fact that such writers as Lawson and myself had the advantage of writing in a new country. In all museums throughout the world one may see plaster casts of the footprints of weird animals, footprints preserved for posterity, not because the animals were particularly good of their sort, but because they had the luck to walk on the lava while it was cooling. There is just a faint hope that something of the sort may happen to us.
—Andrew Barton Paterson, Sydney, 21 December 1938
SELECTED REFERENCES
BOOKS
Banjo & Christina,The True Story of Waltzing Matilda, Peter and Sheila Forrest, Shady Tree, Darwin, 2008
The Banjo of the Bush, Clement Semmler, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Qld, 1974
Banjo Paterson, Poet by Accident, Dr Colin Roderick, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1993
Bohemians at The Bulletin, Norman Lindsay, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965
Breaker Morant, F.M. Cutlack, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1962
Bushman and Buccaneer: Harry Morant – His Ventures andVerse, Frank Renar, H.T. Dunn, Sydney, 1902
The Essential Henry Lawson, Brian Kiernan, Currey O’Neil, Melbourne, 1982
Happy Dispatches, A.B. Paterson, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1935
Henry Lawson, A Stranger on the Darling, Robyn Lee Burrows and Alan Barton, HarperCollins, Nerang, Qld, 1996
Illalong Children, A.B. Paterson (published in Singer of the Bush, 1983)
Radio Talks, A.B. Paterson (published in Song of the Pen, edited by Rosamund Campbell and Philippa Harvie, Lansdowne, Sydney, 1983)
The River: Sydney Cove to Parramatta, Gregory Blaxell, Halstead Press, Sydney, 2007
Rose Paterson’s Illalong Letters, edited by Dr Colin Roderick, Kangaroo Press, Sydney, 2000
Scapegoats of the Empire, George Witton, D.W. Paterson and Co, Melbourne, 1907
Shoot Straight,You Bastards! Nick Bleszynski, Random House Australia, Sydney, 2002
Singer of the Bush, A.B. Paterson, edited by Rosamund Campbell and Philippa Harvie, Lansdowne Press, 1983
Searching for the Man from Snowy River, W.F. Refshauge, Arcadia, 2012
Song of the Pen, A.B. Paterson, edited by Rosamund Campbell and Philippa Harvie, Lansdowne Press, 1983
Vision Splendid;A History of the Winton District, Peter and Sheila Forrest, Winton Shire Council and Winton District Historical Society and Museum inc., Winton, Qld, 2005
The Walkers of Yaralla, Patricia Skehan, P. Shehan Publishing, Sydney, 2000
Waltzing Matilda,The Secret History of Australia’s Favourite Song, Dennis O’Keeffe, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2012
The World of Henry Lawson, edited by Walter Stone, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1974
NEWSPAPERS
The Advertiser
The Age
The Argus
The Australian Star
The Barrier Miner
The Bathurst Free Press
The Brisbane Courier
The Bulletin
The Burrowa News
The Canberra Times
The Catholic Press
The Clarence and Richmond Examiner
The Corryong Courier
The Daily Telegraph
The Evening News
The Goulburn Evening Penny Post
The Goulburn Herald and Chronicle
The Hawkesbury Herald
The Hebrew Standard of Australasia
The Mercury
The Northern Territory Times and Gazette
Referee
The Register
The Sunday Times
The Sydneian
The Sydney Mail
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Sportsman
Table Talk
The Town and Country Journal
The West Australian
The Western Mail
The Yass Courier
WEBSITES
adb.anu.edu.au
australia.gov.au
awm.gov.au
bwm.org.au
firstworldwar.com
foundingdocs.gov.au
navy.gov.au
sl.nsw.gov.au
trove.nla.gov.au
wikipedia.org
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Jen Lamond for her enthusiasm and passion for this project, and particularly for unearthing all the little details that helped to bring ‘Banjo’s’ story to life. My thanks also to Gregory Blaxell, Alf Cantrell, Gordon Cooper, Elizabeth Griffin, Peter Forrest, Richard Hubbard, Foong Ling Kong and all those who gave up their time and knowledge to shed light on the Paterson story.