[In the following essay, Semmler illuminates A. B. “Banjo” Paterson's integral contribution to the Australian bush verse tradition in the 1890s as one of the most prominent and popular Bulletin writers.]

Andrew Barton Paterson was born on 17 February 1864 at Narambla near Orange, in New South Wales. He died in Sydney in February 1941, just short of his seventy-seventh birthday. At the age when he was taking an active part in the social and literary life of this city and State, that very important period in our history—the 1890s—had begun. Paterson's role in this exciting decade was of particular significance—to that I'll return later in these notes.

He travelled widely around Australia and in the Territories and thus came to appreciate, as few men of his generation did, the enormous future development that could be expected of this vast island continent. By the end of the last century he had deserted his profession of the law for journalism—mainly of the free-lance type to begin with. With a sense of adventure and the urge to travel strong within him, he was off to the Boer War as a correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald to which newspaper he sent back some of the most graphic pieces of reporting that, I think, exist in the history of Australian journalism. He met among others Haig, Allenby, Roberts, French and Winston Churchill. He thought Churchill had a curious combination of ability and swagger, but wasn't really impressed largely because Churchill boasted how, as War Correspondent for the London Morning Post, he'd get his name so well known that he would, to use his own words, ‘fly in’ to Parliament. Which he did, of course. Paterson also didn't think much of Churchill's habit of drinking a bottle of beer for breakfast. But he most of all enjoyed meeting Rudyard Kipling and they became firm friends.

Back in Australia at the end of 1900 Paterson found himself under the wing of Sir James Fairfax of the Herald; he was commissioned to travel over New South Wales writing feature articles. It may not be generally known that Fairfax was a great believer in irrigation; he sent Paterson and a photographer on a dangerous climb down the ravines between two mountains known as Barren Jack and Black Andrew, and it was the result of the articles that Paterson wrote for the Herald, that whipped up enthusiasm for the building of the Burrinjuck Dam. Paterson always said that the name was changed from Barren Jack so English workers and settlers wouldn't be deterred by the word barren. Tempora non mutantur.

Sir James Fairfax then readily commissioned Paterson to go off to China—many great public men have followed and are following in his footsteps—ostensibly to cover the war that threatened after the Boxer Rebellion. He called in at Manila to get the latest on the Philippines-America troubles; he roamed round in China and spent some time with Chinese Morrison, and he got on like a house on fire with him. Later on he once said the three greatest men of affairs he'd met were Churchill, Cecil Rhodes and Morrison—and he rated Morrison the most impressive of the three. The point was, of course, that Morrison had always been an idol of Paterson. Paterson was a great athlete, bushman, horseman, out-doors man; he'd always admired Morrison who as a youth paddled a canoe 1,500 miles down the River Murray; at the age of twenty walked—if you please—2,000 miles through the terrible jungle and then desert country from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Geelong; then led an expedition to New Guinea and got himself speared in the leg by natives. (Paterson recalled that Morrison cut off the shaft of the spear and didn't bother to have the head taken out till he got back to Melbourne. ‘A man like that’, he said, ‘takes some stopping’.) Paterson recorded for posterity many of Morrison's remarks about China and its future—for instance: ‘You can't conceive the amount of trade there is here in China and everybody wanting to have a go at it. And it's nothing to what it will be.’ Prophetic words for 1976!

Paterson went on to London from China; he got on famously in London club society, he was made an honorary member of the National Sporting Club and the Junior Carlton; he spent a few weeks with Kipling when they talked ballads and adventure. I remember writing once that Kipling and Paterson, come to think of it, had much in common—their ballads sold sensationally, Barrack Room Ballads and The Man from Snowy River, and they shared a common enthusiasm for the concept of Empire.

Back in Australia in 1902 Paterson was off to the New Hebrides on a watching brief for Burns Philp, who were sponsoring settlers from Australia to take up land there, ‘Australian Argonauts in their search for the land of the golden cocoanut’, as Paterson ironically described them. Paterson in the course of his South Sea wanderings was intrigued with Norfolk Island as a sort of lotus-land; he met a dentist, he said, who showed him scars on his arm made by sticking a knife in at odd times to see if he was dead or alive. After that Paterson was active in newspaper work and writing in Sydney until 1908 (he was Editor of the Evening News for three years). He then took over a property at Coodra in the magnificent Snowy country around Wee Jasper, and in a few years later another property in the Grenfell district. Then came the Great War and Paterson, at the age of fifty, was off to London, determined to get into some of the action as a War Correspondent. He got a job behind the front lines as an ambulance driver, but then at the end of 1915 found the job he most wanted—as Major Paterson in charge of the Remount Service in Egypt, where he became something of a legend with his great troop of rough-riders and horsemen.

Back in Sydney in the 1920s he edited the racing newspaper the Sportsman until 1930—and for the remaining years of his life he was a free-lance journalist, writer and much respected man about town, with headquarters at the Australian Club, until his death.

My point in giving this summary of his career is to underline the fact that there have been very few Australians since Paterson who could lay claim to this sort of experience at home and abroad. As traveller, soldier, horseman, bushman, overlander, squatter, sportsman, but above all as ballad writer he not only helped to make what has been called the Australian legend, but in his lifetime he was truly part of that legend. And this was mainly accomplished, I believe, because he was that very rare thing, a folk poet, giving in his verses body and outline to the ideas of the outback that existed and still exist in the popular imagination. He encapsulated much of the feeling that stirs the hearts of all of us who rejoice to call ourselves Australians and who respond to that spirit, tradition and atmosphere which is peculiarly Australian (especially if we travel as Paterson had travelled) in lines that are now immortal in our literature, lines like:

And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

He caught as no one has done before or since that free and easy sardonic philosophy of the outback Australian:

I'm travellin' down the Castlereagh, and I'm a station-hand,
I'm handy with the ropin' pole, I'm handy with the brand,
And I can ride a rowdy colt, or swing the axe all day,
But there's no demand for a station-hand along the Castlereagh.

He could conjure up our vast hinterland with its sunlight and colour and mystery and magic in a few lines:

Land of plenty or land of Want, where the grey Companions dance,
Feast or famine or hope or fear and in all things land of chance,
Where Nature pampers or Nature slaps in her ruthless red romance,
And we catch a sound of a fairy's song, as the wind goes whipping by,
Or a scent like incense drifts along from the herbage ripe and dry,
Or the dust-storms dance on their ballroom floor, where the bones of the cattle lie.

In lines like these, since they translate into words the familiar rhythms of our national life and temperament, and fix them forever in the imagination of generations of Australians present and to come—in lines like these Paterson has become an inevitable part of our traditions.

Now, the significant thing, I think, is that the lines I have quoted, and indeed most of the memorable lines that Paterson wrote, were written in the 1890s, and since this decade more than any other saw the creation of what has been called the bush tradition in our literature, perhaps it is worth looking at a little more closely.

Most historians will concede, I think, that the 1890s were the years of a mighty national watershed. Paradoxically some of the most disastrous aspects of the period helped towards the consolidation of a fervent democratic nationalism. A great depression; shearers', miners' and maritime strikes all of which for a time paralysed industry; a discernible xenophobia in public attitudes which sowed the seeds of a White Australia policy—from all of these things, paradoxically as I say, a broad social consciousness emerged, a feeling of mutual relationship, a national unity, all leading to a spirit which was to make Federation possible. Mateship is a word, a concept that comes from this period—I've read nothing more appropriate to that concept than what that grand old man of Australian history, M. H. Ellis, wrote in the Bulletin in 1965:

Literally thousands of Australians lived on the road or in humpies in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Their fires blazed along the tracks, their concertinas and accordions made music. They were far from being all of what is called ‘the working classes’ and though many of them had never heard of mateship, class disappeared in the face of adversity.

Yet, it is most important to stress that this period marked a cultural no less than a nationalist awakening. Much of this, I'm convinced, had to do with the fact that the ideal of a free, compulsory and above all secular education was now a reality. Victoria had led the way in 1872; by 1890 all colonies had followed suit; what was more, each had its public libraries, not least that magnificent foundation of David Scott Mitchell in Sydney; there were even libraries in some country districts—and all States had universities now established with graduates passing into public life. The theatre was alive; entrepreneurs like George Rignold and Alfred Dampier were offering Shakespeare; J. C. Williamson, as well as comic opera and Gilbert and Sullivan, introduced grand opera; the Sydney Town Hall was opened in 1890 with the English organist T. H. Best giving recitals to mark the occasion; Marshall Hall, the first Ormond Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne, organized a symphony orchestra. An Australian school of art emerged—very close in its ideals, if you come to look at it, to those of the literary renaissance emerging side by side with it. Tom Roberts—back from his European studies and his friendship with that great but until recently unrecognized Australian impressionist painter John Peter Russell—Roberts, as I say, along with Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and others were achieving that feeling of light and heat so typical of the outback scene. Hitherto Australian artists seemed to have been unwilling to accept the beauty of their landscapes—the poets, even as far back as Harpur and Kendall, had responded much more willingly. But Australian art seemed obsessed with the subdued tones and cloudy skies inherited from England—Australian forests, like Marcus Clarke's were ‘funeral, secret, stern’. Now, however, came the heroic pastorals of Roberts, ‘Shearing the Ram’ and ‘The Breakaway’ having the same dramatic effect as ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ and the landscape themes of Streeton; the dangers of pioneering, heat and dust, bushrangers, drought, desert and thirst. Here were in art the themes of the bush ballads. The Heidelberg School, in the spirit of the 1890s, sought to convey the actual appearance of Australia, and found its subject matter, enthusiastically, in the bush and the desert no less than in the near-city environs.

Above all, everything in the Australia of the 1890s was favourable to a new and important literary growth. When the decade began, the population was over three millions; by the end of it, it was nearer to six. It was homogeneous in texture and sufficiently homogeneous in outlook; in no other country, as our foremost literary historian, H. M. Green, has recorded, had the British national stocks so blended without a noticeable foreign admixture. So, almost overnight, in this cultural upheaval, there was a nation thirsting for its own literature. The historian A. W. Jose in his book The Romantic Nineties put it magnificently:

Talk of ‘a nest of singing birds’? Everybody sang. Everything was worth writing about, in verse, if possible. The diggings and the seaports, the slums and the Outback, the selections, and the stock-routes and the wheatfields and the artesian bores, all found their poet, and usually found him in high spirits.

There had to be a medium, a national medium, and lo it was there, the bushman's bible, the Sydney Bulletin. Of course it had been there for some time; J. F. Archibald had founded it in the 1880s (Paterson in fact wrote his first ballad for it in June, 1886). But this particular efflorescence of our literature at the turn of and throughout the nineties was the boost that made the Bulletin such a remarkable instrument of our literature, under the guiding hand especially of its no less remarkable literary editor, A. G. Stephens.

It was the Bulletin and the Bulletin writers who consolidated the bush tradition in our literature. Archibald and later Stephens were always on the watch for talent. Archibald, for instance, encouraged a lonely jackeroo, Barcroft Boake, to write his verses; he eventually produced one of the finest ballads we have, ‘Where the Dead Men Lie’. He heard of a man with an inexhaustible flow of island stories, working in a Manly quarry, and so discovered Louis Becke; he was convinced that Lawson, a young coach-painter whose verses and pieces of prose came sporadically into his office, had the mark of genius; he advised Brady against reading Kipling, telling him rather to ‘write his sea stuff in his own way’. He called Paterson up to see him, and as Paterson years later recalled it:

Off I went … and climbed a grimy flight of stairs at 24 Pitt Street, until I stood before a door marked ‘Mr Archibald, Editor’. On the door was pinned a spirited drawing of a gentleman lying quite loose on the strand with a dagger through him, and on the drawing was written: ‘Archie, this is what will happen to you if you don't use my drawing about the policeman!’ It cheered me up a lot. Evidently this was a free and easy place. Anyone who wants to know what Archibald looks like should see his portrait by Florence Rodway in the Sydney Art Gallery. It is a marvellous likeness of the bearded and bespectacled Archibald, peering at a world which was all wrong. Not that he ever put forward any concrete scheme for setting it right; he diagnosed the diseases and left others to find the cure.

In an interview of ten minutes he said he would like me to try some more verse. Did I know anything about the bush? I told him that I had been reared there. ‘All right’, he said, ‘have a go at the bush. Have a go at anything that strikes you. Don't write anything like other people if you can help it. Let's see what you can do.’

So Paterson joined that easy-going and much-reminisced-about sodality of Bulletin writers, although there is no evidence that he was ever an active member of the cliques which grew up around the various celebrities. There was a group which clustered around Lawson of which Le Gay Brereton was the presiding genius, and another around Victor Daley—the Dawn and Dusk Club, whose president was called the Symposiarch, with several Heptarchs beneath him and the club rules printed in Chinese. Paterson is remembered often outside the Bulletin office with groups of writers including Lawson, Roderick Quinn, Randolph Bedford, E. J. Brady, Edward Dyson and others. He also met at this time William Goodge, just back from carrying his swag through the shearers' camps, full of the love of the outback and shortly to take over the editorship of the Orange Leader, where he wrote his rather ironical bush ballads.

Paterson's literary bond with his fellow writers about the Australian bush was forged by the Bulletin. His fellow writers were not only balladists; they were writers of sketches and short stories as well (and it is opportune at this point to say that Paterson as a prose writer has been consistently under-rated). Apart from the quickening pulse of nationalism which was apparent to greater or less extent in these writers (unconsciously democratic in form, ‘offensively’ so in Furphy or Lawson), they shared other characteristics and emotions. There was a consciousness of the Australian landscape—manifested in the greyness and brownness and redness of the outback with its occasional bursts of colour, whether the golden mist of a wattle-tree or the rose-pink flush of a babble of grey galahs turning against the sky; and the environment influence of the irregular, unpredictable rhythms of drought and fertility, of flooded streams and dry creek-beds, of dust and of greenness, with always the vivid blue skies offering day after day a benediction of winter sunshine or a curse of dry burning heat. These writers were entirely self-sufficient and relied not in the slightest on old-world examples; they shared a good-natured fatalistic humour, an ironic acceptance of reverses (even death), a laconic understatement of their troubles, optimism never defeatism, and the willingness to gamble on something being ‘bound to turn up’. They believed in mateship and the doctrine of a helping hand; they accepted at face-value a stranger or new chum (as long as he was an Australian). They wrote from horse, from on foot, from down the mines, from back-breaking selections, from shearing-sheds and overland camp-fires, ‘tranquillizing their own loneliness, rejoicing in their own heroic exploits, grinning with a certain pride at their own hard-bitten reflections’. Their most characteristic mode of expression was the bush ballad, a simple versification, usually in primitive metre, often in ragged rhyme, of outback life: incidents, characters, anecdotes, and especially, adventures. The old bush songs had pointed the way; the dramatic surge into literacy even in the isolated townships and stations gave the audience; the Bulletin was largely the medium. The result was a combination of nascence and eager fulfilment by an astonishing variety and medley of writers, never to occur again. Out of it came vigour, space, freedom and humanity—the qualities of the ballad at its best. And Paterson was king. No more appropriate and memorable assessment of our literary balladists exists, than H. M. Green's:

The Australian ballad falls into a number of sub-groups. The most characteristic, and on the whole the most important, if only on account of its leader, is the equestrian: here Paterson canters down the centre, dreaming of the wide plains; with Ogilvie out on one flank, waving at a girl in the distance and Boake on the other, smoking himself into a deeper gloom: and, not far off, ‘The Breaker’ taking a tricky colt over a high fence. Then there are the swagmen led by Henry Lawson, who humps a heavy drum along the dusty road. Dyson leans over the windlass of a mine, and, near him a party of prospectors strings off into the far west. Farther ahead and later in time, Souter is talking to a mallee farmer beside his stump-jump plough; and ‘John O'Brien’ waits for his Sunday flock, who are gathering round the little church. Over the eastern horizon, on a Port Jackson wharf, Brady listens to a half-drunken sailor's story of seas and mermaids and stranger cargoes, though occasionally he wanders inland; Will Lawson is not far from him, and Souter leaves his mallee farmers to make a sea voyage now and then …

Sometimes I think it is a pity Paterson wrote ‘Waltzing Matilda’; too many people know his name only because of that song. The fact is rather that in all of his prose writings and ballads there is this spirit of Australia and our outback traditions manifested more remarkably, more affectionately than in any other Australian writer then or since—not excluding even Henry Lawson. Hugh Paterson, his son, said once, ‘he loved Australia and he loved the bush of Australia and anything to do with the Australian way of life’. It is this, above all, that shines in his writing and makes it everlastingly memorable.

In this day and age when, if I may quote Paterson out of context in time,

… the times are dull and slow, the brave old days are dead
When hardy bushmen started out, and forced their way ahead
By tangled scrub and forests grim towards the unknown west,
And spied at last the promised land from off the range's crest.

I can only conclude with two tributes by writers infinitely worthier than I to make such judgment—one a great Australian writer now passed on; another happily still with us, and perhaps for his very Australianness too, our greatest living native writer; and I use the word native in the sense of love and identification with our country and its landscape.

The former is Vance Palmer who said, in a broadcast tribute over the ABC on the night of Paterson's death in 1941:

He laid hold both of our affections and imaginations; he had made himself a vital part of the country we all know and love, and it would have been not only a poorer country but one far less united in bonds of intimate feeling, if he had never lived and written. …

The latter is Douglas Stewart, who wrote in the Foreword to that splendid collection of Australian Bush Ballads that he and Nancy Keesing edited in 1955, and to which I heartily commend you:

As a bush balladist, Paterson is widest in range, most fertile in the creation of national types, whether humorous or heroic, as deft as any in versification … most typical of the proud, robust and sardonic spirit of his age, surest in his instinctive understanding that the first thing a balladist should do is tell a story.

God knows, we seem to have little in the way of, or seem to be doing little in the way of, preserving our heritage nowadays. Your embattled Society, Mr Acting President, and a few other organizations are, I know, honourable exceptions. But there is a great apathy in these things. By and large, there is a mindlessness in our society, a society which has become Americanized, media-ized, processed and packaged (like so many of the foods we eat), McDonalized, Colonel Sanderized, Playboyized—whatever. Our cities are pretty well indistinguishable from their American and Western counterparts; the main streets of Zurich or San Francisco or Teheran or Sydney, except for language signs, seem identical.

To go back to ‘Banjo’ Paterson is like breathing the air of his western plains at dusk—say somewhere between Hay and Booligal; like savouring again the richness and freshness of the country that our grandfathers, even our fathers knew better than we do despite all our modern communications. Paterson through his ballads and writings about Australia gives us the opportunity, as I say, to breathe this air again, to get a better appreciation of our heritage. Because of all these things that I have tried to say to-night, I believe that ‘Banjo’ Paterson is Australia's best-loved poet.