A Sydney solicitor wrote Australia’s bush into song
Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (1864–1941) practised law in Sydney while sending bush ballads to The Bulletin under the name of his favourite horse. He gave Australia The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda, the song recorded more than any other Australian tune.
Paterson was born on 17 February 1864 at Narrambla, near Orange in New South Wales, and grew up on a farm at Illalong near Yass, where passing drovers, bullock teams, and picnic-race horsemen shaped his love of horses. After a governess and the Binalong bush school he went to Sydney Grammar in 1874, leaving at 16 when he missed a university scholarship. He clerked for a Sydney law firm and qualified as a solicitor in 1886.
His first poem in The Bulletin, in 1885, attacked the British war in the Sudan. Signed The Banjo, his ballads made him one of the journal’s stars, and he carried on a friendly verse feud with Henry Lawson over whether bush life was romantic or grim. The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses sold 5,000 copies in four months in 1895. That year, at Dagworth Station in Queensland, Christina Macpherson played him a tune she had heard at a Warrnambool race, and he wrote Waltzing Matilda to it; soon afterwards his eight-year engagement to Sarah Riley ended.
He sailed to the Boer War in October 1899 for Sydney and Melbourne papers, and was the first correspondent to ride into Bloemfontein. He also reported on the Boxer Rebellion, edited the Evening News from 1903, and married Alice Walker that year. In World War I he drove ambulances in France, then joined a remount unit, was wounded in 1916, and left the army a major in 1919.
A heart attack killed him in Sydney at 76, on 5 February 1941. His face is on Australia’s $10 note, with the text of The Man from Snowy River in its microprint, and in 1983 Slim Dusty’s Waltzing Matilda became the first song astronauts broadcast to Earth.
Source: Banjo Paterson
