The collected verse of A. B. Paterson, containing The man from Snowy River, Rio Grande [and] Saltbush Bill, J.P. ; with an introd. by Frederick T. Macartney

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Introduction

Andrew Barton Paterson, eldest of a family of two sons and five daughters, was bom on 17th February 1864 at Narambla, near Orange, New South Wales. His father, Andrew Bogle Paterson, came of an old Scotch family, and his mother was Rose, daughter of Robert Johnstone Barton, of Boree Station. Their home was Illalong, a station in the Yass district. Andrew Bogle Paterson had lost heavily in two previous grazing ventures in north-west New South Wales and Queensland, and now, a few years after the birth of his son, Illalong passed into the hands of a mortgagee, but he remained as manager.

There Andrew Barton Paterson lived until he was about ten years of age. Then, after some preparatory education, he attended Sydney Grammar School. He spent his vacations at the station, a good rider, enjoying the activities and associations which later provided material for his writings. Indoors, though without means to be lavish, there was comfort and also books and the cultivated interests that go with them. Literary inclinations in the family are indicated by the fact that Paterson's father preceded him as a contributor of verse to the Bulletin, and afterwards a sister, Jessie, also had verses published in its columns. During schooldays in Sydney Paterson lived congenially at Gladesville with his grandmother, Mrs Robert Barton. She, too, wrote verse, and circulated it privately among her friends, some of whom were prominent in Sydney cultural life of the time. At the age of sixteen he matriculated, and was articled to a firm of solicitors. After being himself enrolled as a solicitor, he became managing clerk for another law firm, and later practised in a partnership with the name of Street and Paterson.

When "Clancy of the Overflow", by 'The Banjo", appeared in the 1889 Christmas number of the Bulletin, Rolf Boldrewood hailed it as "the best bush ballad since Gordon". Further verses with the same pen-name aroused considerable interest, as well as curiosity concerning the identity of the author, which was not revealed until the publication in 1895 of The Man from Snovpy River and Other Verses. The success of this book was described in the London Literary Yearhook as "without parallel in colonial literary annals" and as giving its author a public wider than that of any other living writer in the language except Kipling. The first edition sold out in a fortnight, the tenth thousand was reached within a year, and altogether sales exceeded 100,000. During 1895 Paterson spent some months visiting friends on stations in Queensland, and late in that year, while at Dagworth, a property about fifty miles north-west of Winton, he wrote the words of the now famous "Waltzing Matilda", to the tune of a marching song of Marlborough's army. Back again in Sydney, he fraternized with authors and artists of the time, wrote for the press, then, for the purpose of some descriptive articles for a tourist publication, took ship to Darwin, experiencing the life of that region ashore and afloat.

Towards the end of 1899, having returned to Sydney, he gave up legal practice, and sailed for South Africa as war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald in the Boer War. Returning to Australia in the latter part of 1900, he almost immediately departed, by way of the Philippines, to China, expecting an opportunity as a war correspondent again; but the fighting connected with the Boxer Rebellion had ended in the meantime, so he went on to London. In 1902, in Sydney once more, he delivered a series of lectures on the Boer War, and repeated them in country towns as well as in Tasmania and New Zealand. In 1903 he married Alice Walker, of Tenterfield, whom he had met during his lecture tour. From 1904 to 1906 he was editor of the Sydney Evening News, and in 1907 and 1908 edited the Town and Country Journal. In the latter year he acquired an interest in a station, Coodra Vale, on the Upper Murrumbidgee, in country he knew and loved, and made his home there with his wife and their son and daughter. Soon after the 1914-18 war broke out, he sold this property and went to London, hoping for an appointment as a war correspondent. He was disappointed in this, but anxious for war service, though he was now fifty years of age, he became an ambulance driver in France for the Australian hospital at Wimereux. In 1916 he was appointed Remount Officer to the A.I.F. in Egypt, with the rank of Major. There his wife joined him and worked for the British Red Cross. They returned to Australia in 1919 and settled with their two children in Sydney, and he continued to work as a freelance writer. In the New Year honours of 1939 he was made C.B.E. He died at Sydney on 5 th February, 1941.

The success of his first book of poems. The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (1895) has already been mentioned. Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses (1902) was reprinted several times. It contained at the end a number of poems of the Boer War, inevitably suggestive of Kipling, whose influence is rather too plain in a few poems in the other two books. Salthush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses (1917) included some of Paterson's earliest work. The three volumes were in 1921 combined in one as The Collected Verse of A. B. Paterson, of which this is the sixteenth printing. He was the author of three books of fiction, namely, a novel, An Outback Marriage (1906), Three Ele'phant Power and Other Stories (1917), and another novel. The Shearer's Colt (1936). His Hap'py Dis'patches (1934) records impressions of notabilities he met while abroad. The Animals Noah Forgot (1933) is a collection of verses mosdy descriptive of Australian fauna, for juvenile reading. Paterson also compiled a book of Old Bush Songs, Composed and Sung in the Bushranging, Digging and Overlanding Days (1905) His earliest publication was Australia for the Australians (1888), suggesting land reforms as a remedy for the prevalent unemployment and the drift to the cities.

Paterson's poetry has a special connexion with the time when it was written. The Sydney Bulletin had been founded in 1880, and, by encouraging Australians to write about life outback, it set bushmen rhyming. This was not entirely new. There were already some bush songs, sung around camp-fires, in huts and shearingsheds, and on the track. The tunes were mainly those of oversea songs. The words, of unknown authorship, were often similarly imitative, but with more originality because of the Australian themes. It was a local folklore so far as this was possible in a land with so short a history as that of the white man in Australia. The verse of the Bulletin bards had a similar but wider significance in a multitude of rhymes of droving and boundary riding and shearing and other station activities, of bushrangers, life on farms and in remote townships, with horse racing and other diversions, often alcoholic. Of the many who wrote them, a score are represented by collections in book form, but the two outstanding names are Paterson and Henry Lawson.

They had different points of view which they aired in the Btdletin in a kind of verse debate. A poem like Paterson's "Clancy of the Overflow" was to Lawson a false idealization of bush life, which he accordingly attacked in "Up the Country"; Paterson's reply, "In Defence of the Bush", was just as forceful; Lawson then satirized Paterson as "The City Bushman" in a poem with that title; and Paterson dealt with Lawson and other detractors of the bush in "An Answer to Various Bards". The question of their respective merits as poets does not arise here, and Lawson certainly wrote some excellent bush ballads; but his unfortunate personal experience led him to stress unduly the harsh aspects of the outback, and a corollary of this was the recurring note of social protest in his verse. Neither of these traits, though both had foundation enough, was typical of bush life, with its acceptance of the bad with the good, often sardonic, but not much concerned with any social problems involved. Thus Paterson's simple approach is truer, and his range makes him, as compared with the others besides Lawson, pre-eminent among the balladists.

Allowing for the difference of time, his verses are like the ballads which chronicled common life and doughty deeds in medieval times, and which are now enhanced by the romantic atmosphere of a distant past and its archaic manner. Oral transmission through generations obscured their origin and, in the best of them, distilled the diction finely. More generally, faults are not hard to find, but are accepted as having the common tang of the time. It is somewhat the same with the verbal defects in Paterson's verse. His work has enough quality and resource to show that he could have overcome them, but they are often so much the natural expression of the life he writes about that they help to reveal it, almost as if he were its passive instrument. The gleams of authentic poetry — say, for instance, the opening of "The Travelling Post Office" or passages in "The Man from Snowy River" — occur as casually as the lapses. The worst of these consist of sentimentality in a few detached instances like "Only a Jockey" and "A Bunch of Roses", or when though rarely, as in "Lost", a bush poem emphasizes a sentiment disproportionately. The comic element, on the other hand, is wholesome, and Paterson revels in it. Sometimes it helps to typify a place, as wdth the two "Dandaloo" poems and "Hay and Hell and Booligal"; or it gives colour to a character such as "Saltbush Bill" or 'The Man from Ironbark"; or it may divert incredibility, as in "Father Riley's Horse" and "The City of Dreadful Thirst", with their approach to the supernatural or eerie — for this is perhaps the only phase of balladry that Paterson fails to make convincing, even when he is wholly serious about it in "Rio Grande's Last Race". His comic ballads are outright fun, but they nevertheless vitalize the circumstances and people portrayed.

His verse belongs to the true ballad tradition of tales musically told and heightened with simple glamour. This may consist of some special prowess, as of "The Man from Snowy River"; or heroism like that of the bushranger giving his life to save a comrade in "How Gilbert Died"; or even the exploit of a less romanticized oudaw as in "Conroy's Gap"; or the outcome of a horse race in more than a dozen of Paterson's poems; or it may be concerned with bush life apart from any special event, as in "Clancy of the Overflow" and "A Bushman's Song"; but always there is the tone of period and place and the manner of the people in the telling.

He writes as bush folk themselves would if they were able, and it is this that has made his poetry popular with them and with city people to whom it is on that account just as interesting. It is not likely to be less so. Time, with the changes of a mechanical age, has already given a legendary attraction to some of the old bush ways. When the future looks back to the past as we look back to the middle ages, Paterson's poetry will probably have the aura of old minstrelsy. He best of all has sung the action of bush life in that natural music of rhythm and rhyme which has a perpetual general appeal.

Frederick T. Macartney