What is it about AB “Banjo” Paterson?



I don’t understand why, 150 years after his birth and a century after he wrote his most lauded ballads and poems, Paterson is still casually referred to as the Australian writer who somehow defines our national identity.

There is no doubt that his work still resonates with Australian readers. For evidence we need look no further than Orange in south-west New South Wales, close to the bush bard’s birthplace, where the inaugural Banjo Paterson festival is now under way.

Believe me – it’s not for want of trying. But Paterson’s idealised bush landscape, full of heavily caricatured tough, resourceful but egalitarian men, is as lost on me today as it was when I was introduced to his work as a secondary student. It has, quite simply, never rung true to me.

Sure, I find his verse entertaining and I can’t help but be compelled by Jack Thompson reciting Clancy of the Overflow. But his subjects seem to me as foreign as wild west cowboys – mythologised in their own way by a legion of American writers and dramatists.

I greatly admire Paterson’s journalism. He was undoubtedly an accomplished reporter, writing about many things including sport and war with insight, passion and often terrific humour (studying his profile of the extraordinarily complex field marshal Sir Edmund Allenby should be mandatory in journalism schools).

But mostly Australia cherishes Paterson for his stories of the bush: ballads and poems about horses, daring stockmen, resourceful settlers and of course that suicidal swaggie whose plight is charted in Waltzing Matilda.

When Paterson was at the height of a prolonged literary success that straddled colonial and early federation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Australians were already well and truly city dwellers. They were being born in or migrating en masse to the ever-expanding cities on the coastal plains, distancing themselves from the land – physically, if not emotionally.

For most Australians today any attachment to the bush is purely nostalgic. Rarely is the link closely familial or, indeed, practical, beyond the occasional camping trip (a site not too close to the toilet block, please) or bushwalk (avoid ticks and leeches by keeping to the marked tracks).

But they were and – judging by Paterson’s enduring popularity – still are sentimentally attached to Australia’s pastoral frontier heritage. This is no bad thing, especially as the continent finds itself mired in drought. But perhaps it also helps account for why the government will act on the weight of expectation to assist farmers in a way that it will not to help many of those who stand to lose manufacturing jobs in the cities.

Paterson astutely recognised this emotional resonance and mined it for a literary worth that has continuing retail ker-ching today. His journalism certainly evidenced his acute eye for events and characters. He could be very good at needling out the truth.

But his fictional bush was as mythic then as it is today, and glaringly notable for its omissions – not least of women and Indigenous Australians.

Yes, they were different times. The bar on political and social sensibility was low, as evidenced by the masthead line – Australia for the White Man – on the Bulletin, the magazine where some of Paterson’s earliest and most praised work appeared. In that, he was a man of his times (and don’t start me on Paterson and the Chinese – the “Chow”, as he called them).

For the most part Paterson’s bush was no place for the fairer sex. Yes, the white women were outnumbered by the men; this accounted for so much of the violence between Aboriginal and settler men on the frontier. But the settler women – in real life no less resourceful, tough and resilient than their menfolk – became the bedrock of Australian colonial country life. They stayed at home to care for children and stock, to cart water, to deal with the snakes and the bushfires – and yes, the hostile people whose land the European settlers had appropriated – while the men went a-drovin’.

Curiously, for a bloke who made so much of the white pioneer’s affinity with bush, Paterson mostly cast Indigenous people as comic layabouts, like lazy King Billy from Johnson’s Antidote and Jacky Jack from Saltbush Bill JP. They seem an indolent lot, half-touched and God-fearing, as far removed from their antecedents as we are today, or perhaps ever were, from Clancy.

Paterson – who covered the Boer war – wrote sympathetically and respectfully about the Boer in a way that eluded his writing about Aboriginal people. His writing covers the frontier of that other colony in distant Africa but it does not chart the violent pastoral frontier in his own land, the stories about which were legion – and still unfolding – as he wrote.

When I worked at the Bulletin, the ghosts of Paterson and Lawson, and many other treasures including Breaker Morant, would be evoked over boozy Christmas lunches and more privately as we travelled the country to write its stories.

But I found little in the country’s past or present that echoed with my readings of Paterson’s ballads and poetry.

Give me instead Eleanor Dark for insight into the violence of the frontier. And then give me Katharine Susannah Prichard on the travails of the colonial woman. The remarkable short story Squeaker’s Mate by Barbara Baynton offers another perspective to the pioneer bloke altogether.

I can be confident, at least, that their Australia did actually exist.