Poetic justice from two of Australia's best-loved bards

'Once a jolly swagman sat beside a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolibah tree
And he sang as he sat and waited 'til his billy boiled,
Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?'

'A land of sombre, silent hills, where mountain cattle go
By twisted tracks, on sidelings deep, where giant gum trees grow
And the wind replies, in the river oaks, to the song of the stream below.
A land where the hills keep watch and ward, silent and wide awake
As those who sit by a dead campfire, and wait for the dawn to break,
Or those who watched by the Holy Cross for the dead Redeemer's sake.'

Banjo Paterson, Australian Scenery

'There are scenes in the distance where beauty is not, On the desolate flats where gaunt apple trees rot. Where the brooding old ridge rises up to the breeze

From his dark lonely gullies of stringy-bark trees, There are voice-haunted gaps, ever sullen and strange, But Eurunderee lies like a gem in the range.'

Henry Lawson, Eurunderee


We've all heard the words of Australia's national song - particularly before those hard-fought Bledisloe Cup rugby matches - and many Kiwis know them.

It's a poem which strikes quite a chord on this side of the Tasman, presumably because of the closeness of our history and culture. We've had our own swagmen, squatters, injustices, tragedies and millions of jolly jumbucks.

But who wrote it and why? Finding out is as good a reason as any to cross the ditch to Sydney and head for the vast rural hinterland of New South Wales and Queensland.

It's a region not often visited by New Zealand tourists yet it is filled with tales of gold and bushrangers, historic buildings and beautiful scenery, fine food and increasingly excellent wine, weird animals and charming people.

Driving through its wide, sun-scorched plains on a hot day you'll see many a billabong, its cool waters giving life to a tree or two, under which sheep take shelter from the searing sun.

This is the country where Australia's two so-called bush poets, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, were born and raised and from which they took their inspiration.

The two came from very different backgrounds. Paterson, from a well-to-do family of graziers, was educated at Sydney Grammar School and while still a young man became a partner in a law firm. He took a romantic view of the Outback, seeing it as a place of adventure and excitement.

By contrast, Lawson's family was extremely poor, he received little education, rarely had regular work and tended towards a darker perspective, focusing more on droughts, hard labour and grinding poverty.

But between them they captured a sense of the making of a new country, and did so in verse which was accessible, readily understandable and easy to recite.

To explore their world, the best starting point is the New South Wales city of Orange, 250km from Sydney, a pleasant leafy place, which calls itself the Colour City because of the contrasting colours which spring up with the different seasons.

Orange is where Andrew Barton Paterson was born on February 17, 1864, at Narrambla, the home of his aunt and uncle, Rose and John Templer. As well as providing his mother with somewhere more civilised to give birth than the rough sheep station where her husband was working, the Templers also provide a transtasman connection, because five years later they moved to New Zealand.

Today, Narrambla's home paddock, about 5km from the city centre, has become Banjo Paterson Park, a pleasant grassy area with a grove of huge oak trees, a great spot for picnics.

Unfortunately, little remains of the homestead, which burned down in 1895, or the steam-powered flour mill the Templers ran, which was demolished "for safety reasons" in 1971, though the sites are marked with plaques.

In 1947 Banjo's widow Alice, who moved to Orange after his death, unveiled a monument there bearing a verse from one of his most famous poems, Clancy of the Overflow, about his love of the Outback:

"And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,

And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars."

Later a bust was erected nearby depicting the poet in old age, face amiably wrinkled, broad-brimmed hat at a slight angle and sucking on an old pipe.

There are plenty of other mementos of Banjo to be seen in a stroll round Orange's city centre.

A bluestone building, which now houses, of all things, Barratt and Smith Pathology, is where young Bartie - as he was known - was christened. Holy Trinity Church has the christening book recording the baptism. .

The house where his widow lived still stands at 95 Byng St. In the Orange Civic Theatre there is a feature wall of bricks salvaged from the Templers' mill.

Four years ago another memorial to the poet was unveiled in Orange Civic Square by his two granddaughters. It's a sort of silhouette in painted iron of Banjo, complete with hat, pipe, collar and tie, plus a talking book which tells the story of his life and contains excerpts from several poems.

They hold a Banjo Paterson Festival in Orange every February and the winners of the writing competitions have their names recorded on plaques around the memorial.

When Bartie - as his family called him - was about a month old, his mother took him home to Buckinbah station, near the modern Yeoval, about 60km from Orange down what these days is called the Banjo Paterson Highway.

It's a picturesque drive through grassy plains and hills dotted with clumps of trees, a few watering holes and hundreds of sheep dozing in the heat.

These days the focal point of Yeoval seems to be the Angora Tourist Farm where they shear rabbits instead of sheep. But there is also a roadside monument to Banjo built using stones from his childhood home, and not far away are its crumbled remains.

While Bartie was growing up in these pleasant surroundings, some 200km south in the goldmining settlement of Grenfell, his fellow bush poet arrived into rather different circumstances.

The modern Grenfell is a charming town, full of lovely old buildings, many with ornate wrought iron balconies, a delightful local museum and some grand stories of gold and bushrangers. But the place where Lawson was born on June 17, 1867 was a rough shack outside the town where his father was working an unproductive gold claim.

In 1924 an obelisk was erected to mark the spot and today it sits under a huge gum tree, planted by Lawson's daughter Bertha, on the edge of the local sportsfield now known as Lawson Oval. It's a pleasant spot to rest in the shade, but watch out for the flaming galahs roosting in the branches because one of them dumped on me.

The Lawsons stayed in Grenfell only a year, but nevertheless each June the town holds a Henry Lawson Festival of Arts to commemorate its most famous son, with an eclectic mix of activities ranging from poetry and short story competitions to woodchopping and guinea pig racing.

On the Sunday, Lawson enthusiasts gather early at the memorial, cook dampers for breakfast and read his poems.

There is also a bust of Lawson in the main street, gazing wistfully out of a small corrugated iron shelter, originally built to house a road toll barometer but now pressed into use as accommodation for an often homeless poet.

Lawson later wrote a poem about Grenfell acknowledging its reprimand that "you never paid a visit to a town you never saw" but that it was still his birthplace.

In it he imagines the town telling him,

"Though you sing of dear old Mudgee and the home on Pipeclay Flat,

You were born on Grenfell goldfields - and you can't get over that."

Coincidentally, the other bush poet, Paterson, did come came to know Grenfell. Fifty years later he became part-owner of the nearby wheat farming property of Glen Esk and ran it for about a year.

When Paterson was 5 and Lawson aged 1, both moved to the places they would come to regard as their homes.

The Patersons moved 270km south to the lovely old pastoral town of Yass, while the Lawsons moved 280km north to the even more charming gold town of Gulgong.

Paterson's father took over Illalong station, a gracious homestead which is still standing, though it is privately owned so you can't see it. Nevertheless, it's well worth driving out to the Binalong Valley, where the house is, to get a feel for the days when it was on the main route between Sydney and Melbourne, allowing young Bartie to see the stage coaches and bullock to see the stage coaches and bullock trains which later featured in his writing. Paterson obviously loved the place and his pen name, The Banjo, came from a horse the family owned at Illalong.

Modern-day Yass certainly seems to regard him as one of the family. There's a bronze bust of him in the Yass Information Centre, which, when I visited was sporting a pair of red antlers so the old poet could feel part of the Christmas celebrations.

Just off the main street is another Banjo Paterson Park with yet another bust, flanked by quotations from his poems, but unlike the more formal setting in Orange this is next to a children's play area where local youngsters happily swing and slide, rather as one imagines Bartie doing.

Unfortunately, Lawson's memories of Gulgong were not so happy. A painfully shy boy, he hated school and things got worse when at the age of 9 an ear infection left him deaf. Classmates sometimes taunted him as Barmy Harry.

His writings mostly recall Gulgong, and nearby Mudgee where the family also lived, as a miserable wasteland. In an ode to an old flour bin made by his father, which is on display in Gulgong's wonderful Henry Lawson Centre, he says,

"Oh, how our mothers struggled,
Till eyes and brain were dull,
O, how our fathers slaved and toiled,
To keep those flour bins full."

Still, it wasn't all bad, because his father eventually struck gold and built a proper house with an iron roof and a brick chimney - the chimney forms part of a memorial to the poet on Gulgong's Henry Lawson Drive - and his mother Louisa introduced him to the world of poetry.

Gulgong is also home to the marvellous old Prince of Wales Opera House, which began its life as a music hall in the 1870s, and where young Harry saw The Pirates of Penzance.

Lawson later recalled the experience enthusiastically:

"Rough-built theatres and stages where the world's best actors trod,
Singers bringing reckless rovers nearer boyhood, home and God,
Paid in laughter, tears and nuggets in the drama fortune plays,
'Tis the palmy days of Gulgong - Gulgong in the Roaring Days."

It's hard to find echoes of Lawson's bleak childhood in the Gulgong of today, which is one of the most delightful places in New South Wales, with its fine old houses, impressive art galleries, tree-lined streets and pleasant pubs. Gulgong, like Grenfell, holds a Henry Lawson Heritage Festival in June with a performance of his works in the opera house, literary awards and a poetry breakfast.

One of the highlights of both festivals is a re-enactment of the Lawson family's migration from Grenfell to Gulgong by a convoy of wagons, coaches and buggies. When they reach Gulgong, they're met on the outskirts by a life-sized statue of Lawson, hat in hand, still looking down in the dumps.

As he entered his teens Harry's unhappy life showed no signs of improving, and diverged even more sharply from Paterson's. Lawson had to leave school at 13 to labour for his father on building projects. By contrast the 12-year-old Paterson went to Sydney Grammar School and later worked for a firm of lawyers. But, from those totally different paths the two young men were to converge in the world of poetry.

Lawson's mother Louisa left her husband, took her children to Sydney and before long was campaigning for women's rights, republicanism and social improvement. Within a few years she and her friends were publishing political magazines, The Republican, and Dawn, the first newspaper for women. And soon young Henry was helping out.

Neither of the young men was happy in Sydney. Lawson was unable to hold down a job while Paterson quickly became bored with the routine of office life.

Before long, the confident, wealthy, well-educated lawyer, and the poor, shy, unemployable drop-out, turned to writing to express their thoughts.

Banjo's first ballad, El Mahdi to the Australian Troops, was published in the Bulletin in 1885 and two years later Lawson's Song of the Republic appeared in the same magazine.

From then on work by the two appeared regularly, particularly in the Bulletin, but also in other publications.

Sydney's historic trail includes both the Bond St offices of Street & Paterson, where Paterson practised law, and the home of Louisa Lawson, in Phillip St, where Henry scribbled verses in a lean-to in the backyard.

Despite his affluence Paterson detested the city, of which he wrote,

"And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me,
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste."

When the two young poets first met isn't clear but in 1892 they engaged in a sort of verse duel in the pages of the Bulletin about their different views of the bush.

Paterson's view was summed up by romantic lines like,

"As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars."

By contrast Lawson's vision was:

"Sunny plains! Great Scott, those burning wastes of barren soil and sand
With their everlasting fences stretching out across the land!
Desolation where the crow is! Desert where the eagle flies,
Paddocks where the luny bullock starts and stares with reddened eyes."

Thereafter Sydney remained a sort of home base for both although they continued to lead wandering lives.

Paterson achieved overnight fame with the publication in 1895 of his first collection of poems, The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses. It sold out within a week, making its author the toast of the town, has remained a bestseller ever since and also inspired a successful film.

It was about the same time that he wrote what was to become his most famous ballad, Waltzing Matilda.

To seek the origins of that poem it's necessary to head 1800km northwest of Sydney to the Queensland town of Winton. Paterson was holidaying at the Macpherson family's Dagworth Station about 100km from Winton when he dashed off those verses about the swagman.

Recalling events 35 years later Paterson said Christine Macpherson "used to play a little Scottish tune on a zither and I put words to it and called it Waltzing Matilda".

Christine herself recalled, "One day I played from ear a tune which I had heard played by a band at the races in Warrnambool, a country town in the Western District of Victoria. Mr Paterson asked what it was. I could not tell him, and he then said he thought he could write some lines to it. He then and there wrote the first verse. We tried it and thought it went well, so he then wrote the other verses."

The little Scottish tune was almost certainly Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea, said to be based on a traditional melody, Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself.

The Waltzing Matilda sung that day in the station homestead was not quite the same as the song we hear before Bledisloe Cup matches, both the words and the tune having been tinkered with over the years. The version we know was actually published as an advertisement for Billy Tea and arranged by Sydney musician Marie Cowan whose husband was a director of the tea company.

Paterson's poem was probably inspired by a dispute between local squatters and their itinerant shearers in which the shearing shed on Dagworth was burned down and one of the shearers, Samuel "Frenchy" Hoffmeister, shot himself beside the nearby Combo waterhole, though its precise origin has been the subject of much debate over the years.

But, sidestepping such arguments, if you visit Winton - also famous as the place where Qantas was established in 1920 - you'll find the Waltzing Matilda Centre which pays tribute to the song and the swagmen who inspired it.

About 150km northwest is Kynuna with its charming Blue Heeler Hotel, with a statue of a blue heeler on the roof, in which the swagman Hoffmeister drank his last pint before going out to die. In a barn over the road there's a Waltzing Matilda exhibition telling his sad story.

Head 13km south of Kyuna, take the turn-off to the Combo Conservation Park and a 20-minute walk leads to the fabled billabong, a part of the Diamantina River, which is, indeed, lined with coolibah trees, and also notable for the stone weirs built by Chinese labourers in the 1880s.

For Lawson, however, there was no leap to fame and fortune.

Unable to survive through his writing, and suffering from alcoholism, he worked as a shearer on farms in Australia and New Zealand, and in 1897 he and wife Bertha spent a couple of years teaching at Mangamaunu Maori School near Kaikoura, where he wrote several poems, including The Windy Hills o' Wellington, Beautiful Maoriland and The Emigration to New Zealand.

Mangamaunu, which today is a popular surfing beach, was good for Lawson but on his return to Australia his alcoholism worsened, his marriage broke up and his life fell to pieces.

The bitterness he felt about his poverty was described in lines like,

"When you haven't got a billet, and the times are very slack,
There is nothing that can spur you like the shame of going back;
Crawling home with empty pockets, going back hard-up;
Oh! it's then you learn the meaning of humiliation's cup."

For several years he wandered the streets of Sydney begging for booze money, was often imprisoned for drunkenness and also spent time in mental hospitals.

Eventually friends took him in hand, found him a job and a place to stay, and for the last two years of his life the Government gave him a pension. When he died in 1922 he became the first writer to receive a state funeral and was buried at the Waverley Cemetery in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

By contrast Paterson went from strength to strength, building on his success as a poet to become an acclaimed war correspondent in the Boer War and China's Boxer Uprising, subsequently editing several respected publications.

In later life, when he decided to return to the bush he loved, he spent four years running Coodravale cattle station, in the Wee Jasper area, not far from Yass, and raised his family there.

Eventually he returned to Sydney where he lived out his days in comfort, widely acclaimed as a great Australian and heaped with honours, including the CBE.

Paterson died in 1941 and his ashes were interred in a niche at Sydney's Northern Suburbs Crematorium where a sandstone memorial carries a verse from Waltzing Matilda.

There's a certain irony that two poets famous for their writing about the bush both ended up in Australia's biggest city.

And there's further irony in the fact that, despite their sharply contrasting fortunes, the two also ended up on the Australian $10 note.

Lawson, and several of Gulgong's lovely old buildings, appeared on the $10 bill from 1966 to 1991. The new note features Banjo Paterson along with scenes of the hard-riding bushmen portrayed in his poetry.

They were also united, of course, in their love of the harsh beauty of the Australian Outback, which can be both cruel and kind with equal dispassion, a sentiment captured in a way Lawson could probably agree with in Paterson's poem Australian Scenery,

"A land as far as the eye can see, where the waving grasses grow,
Or the plains are blackened and burnt and bare, where the false mirages go,
Like shifting symbols of hope deferred, land where you never know.
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 slays, 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."

It's still like that today.

* Jim Eagles travelled as guest of Tourism New South Wales.

* Further information

www.visitnsw.com.au or phone 0800 100 006.