Banjo Paterson(1864–1941)

Andrew Barton Paterson was born at Narambla, three miles north of Orange in the central west of New South Wales, on 17 February 1864, the eldest of seven children of Andrew Bogan Paterson, a Lanarkshire-born squatter who had emigrated to the colony in 1850, and Rose Barton, Australian-born and sister of the man who would become Australia's first Prime Minister Sir Edmund Barton. The Paterson selection at Buckinbah Station on the Bogan River was lost in the 1860s drought and his father went to manage the Yass district station of Illalong for the Barton family. Banjo was raised in the saddle there, schooled first by his grandmother at Gladesville near Sydney and then at Sydney Grammar School from 1874, and articled at sixteen to the Sydney solicitor Spain and Salway.

He was admitted as a solicitor in 1886 and practised in Sydney for the next sixteen years, first at Spain and Salway, later in partnership as Street and Paterson. The legal work was the quiet half of his week; the other half was the columns of The Bulletin, the Sydney weekly that had set itself the task of inventing an Australian literary voice and which paid two pounds a poem for what its editor J.F. Archibald called the article. Paterson submitted his first verse to the Bulletin in October 1885 under the pen name The Banjo, taken from his father's racehorse, and continued under that name for the next half-century. Clancy of the Overflow appeared in 1889; The Man from Snowy River, the title poem of the 1895 collection that sold seven thousand copies in six months and ten thousand in twelve, made Paterson the most popular poet in Australian history.

In the winter of 1895 he travelled north to Queensland to stay at Dagworth Station, the homestead of his fiancée Sarah Riley's family in the Winton district of the central west. The Queensland shearers' strike of 1894 had been broken there with the burning of the Dagworth shearing shed in September of that year and the shooting of the striker Samuel Hoffmeister at the four-mile billabong below the station two days later; a swagman moving cattle and looking for work would have been turned away from the station at musket-point that summer, and Paterson knew it. Sometime in August or September 1895 he wrote, with the family musician Christina Macpherson playing the Scottish tune Craigielee on a zither beside him at the homestead piano, a ballad of a swagman who steals a sheep, is challenged by the squatter and three troopers, and drowns himself in the billabong rather than be taken. They first performed it that night at the North Gregory Hotel in Winton. Waltzing Matilda became the unofficial national song of Australia within a generation, and is the only popular ballad in the world whose origin is dated to a single station house in a single week.

He returned the manuscript to Sydney that October. Through the next decade he covered the Second Boer War as the Reuters and Sydney Morning Herald correspondent (writing dispatches that ran in London and were read by Kipling, who later corresponded with him), the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900, and the long political journalism of the new Commonwealth federation under his uncle Edmund Barton from 1901. He carried on the Henry Lawson debate in the Bulletin through these years, the two poets' running exchange about whether the bush was paradise or hell, in which Paterson took the romantic side and Lawson the realist. He served on the Australian Remount Service in Egypt through the First World War, ending the war a major and quartermaster of the Australian and New Zealand Light Horse remount depot at Moascar.

He worked his last twenty-five years as a journalist on the Sydney Sportsman and the Sydney Morning Herald, riding to the office in tweed and a hat, finishing the columns by mid-afternoon and going out to the racecourse most weekends. He died at his Gilgandra Road, Killara home in Sydney on 5 February 1941, two weeks short of his seventy-seventh birthday, of heart failure. He is buried at the Northern Suburbs cemetery at Macquarie Park. The Paterson name today carries his memory as the bush balladeer who gave Australia its songs of itself; Waltzing Matilda, The Man from Snowy River and Clancy of the Overflow are recited at every Australian school assembly, and the Paterson portrait is on the Australian ten-dollar note. The Paterson side of the Bulletin debate, the romantic view of the bush as the country's character-making landscape, is the side Australia eventually kept.