All right, I want you to do something for me
right now, a little physical task to get us started.
Okay, I'm ready. If you happen to be in Australia,
just reach into your wallet. If you're listening
from overseas, well, maybe go check that jar
of leftover travel money you keep on the bookshelf.
I know the one. Full of strange coins and maybe
a 20 -kroner note. Exactly. I want you to find
an Australian $10 note. Yeah. Got it. The blue
one. The blue one. Look at the front. You've
got that distinct cool blue tint. And, well,
staring right back at you is a man in a hat.
He looks calm, dignified. Maybe a little rugged
around the edges. It's an iconic piece of portraiture,
really. And if you have incredibly sharp eyesight
or, you know, better yet, a magnifying glass,
take a look at the area just around his shoulder.
Oh, yeah. You'll see these swirling lines of
text. At first glance, it just looks like a design
pattern, but it's actually microprint. Tiny,
microscopic words. The complete text of The Man
from Snowy River and The Man in the Hat is, of
course. Andrew Barton Patterson. Better known
to history and to basically everyone who has
ever held a beer in an Australian pub as Banjo.
Banjo Patterson. Right. Now, usually when you
see a face on a banknote, you make certain assumptions.
You assume they're a statesman, a general, a
monarch. Someone. Stiff. Someone who spent their
life in boardrooms or parliaments. Part of the
establishment. Right. And most people, they see
the hat, they know the name, and they think,
OK, Bush poet. wrote about horses, wrote Walsing
Matilda, national icon, and they just file them
away in this mental box marked Old Colonial History.
He becomes the static grandfatherly figure sitting
under a gum tree. Yes. And that is such a massive
disservice because the dry history book version
of Patterson, the one you get in school, it misses
the actual human being entirely. Oh, absolutely.
When you really start to peel back the layers
of his biography, when you read his personal
letters and look at the trajectory of his life,
you don't find a simple farm boy writing rhymes.
Not at all. That is exactly what blew my mind
when we started researching this deep dive. This
guy wasn't just a poet. I mean, he was a rock
star of the 1890s. He was a high -powered solicitor
handling complex legal cases in the city. He
was a war correspondent hanging out with Winston
Churchill. And Rudyard Kipling? Don't forget
Kipling. Incredible. And as we're going to get
into in quite some detail, he was the central
figure in a messy, high -stakes romantic scandal
that birthed the country's most famous song.
The tea is incredibly hot in this one, as they
say. It really is. We're going to get into the
rumors, the womanizer claims, and the fact that
he kept a box of chocolates for 40 years. Which
is just a wonderful little detail. It's so human.
So our mission today is to move beyond that flat
image on the banknote. We want to meet the adventurer,
the journalist, and the man whose specific vision
of Australia arguably defined the national character
we still talk about today. It's a character study,
really. We're looking at a man who constructed
a romantic ideal of a country, a brand for Australia,
if you will, even while living a life that was
far more sophisticated, urban, and, well, contradictory
than his poems might suggest. So we've got the
comprehensive biography, details on his literary
works, his war diaries, even some analysis of
his personal letters. Let's dive in. Where does
the story of the banjo actually begin? Because
despite the myth, He wasn't born with a pen in
his hand, and he certainly wasn't born into security.
No, far from it. He was born on February 17,
1864, at a property called Narambla, which is
near Orange in New South Wales. Okay, so for
our international listeners, or even for Aussies
who stick to the coast, let's put that on the
map. Orange is west of the Great Dividing Range.
In the 1860s, this wasn't just the country. No,
this was the frontier. This is only a decade
or so after the gold rush has really kicked off,
right? So the infrastructure is thin. It's remote.
Precisely. It was a frontier society. Patterson
was the eldest of seven children. And his father,
Andrew Bogle Patterson, was a Scottish immigrant
from Lanarkshire. And this is a really crucial
detail for understanding Banjo. His father wasn't
part of the established landed gentry. He wasn't
sitting on old money. Not at all. He was a grazier
trying to make a go of it on the land. We should
probably define grazier for our global audience.
Because we aren't just talking about a guy with
a few cows and, you know, a petting zoo. No.
No, not at all. In the Australian context, a
grazier is a large scale pastoralist, someone
raising sheep or cattle, often on these vast
tracts of land for the production of wool or
meat. It's big business. It is a high risk, high
reward business. You are completely dependent
on the global commodity markets and more terrifyingly,
on the Australian climate. And for the Patterson
family, that risk wasn't just some abstract concept.
It bit them hard. Oh, it did. They were living
on a station, which is what we call a large ranch
named Buchenbach. But when young Andrew Arbanjo
was just five years old, disaster struck. The
region was hit by a massive flood and his father
lost his entire wool clip. I want to pause on
that for a second because it sounds almost abstract.
Lost his wool clip. But in economic terms, that's
catastrophic, isn't it? It is total ruin. I mean,
imagine working for 12 solid months. You breed
the sheep, you keep them alive through drought
and disease, you shear them, which is just backbreaking
labor, and you process the wool. That physical
pile of wool represents your entire income for
the year. It's everything. It's your mortgage
payment, your food, your operating costs for
the next year. And then a river rises, and in
a matter of hours, it's all washed away. Gone.
And back then, in 1869, there's no FEMA. There's
no government bailout. There's no insurance policy
that's going to cover acts of God on the frontier.
Exactly. It forced them to sell up. It completely
changed the family's destiny. They couldn't stay
at Bakkenba. They had to move. And this is a
recurring theme you see in Bush life. the boom
and the bust. It's something Patterson would
later capture in his poetry, not because he studied
it in the library, but because he lived the trauma
of it as a five -year -old boy. That experience
must have been seared into his memory. I think
so. The precariousness of it all. So the family
packs up their lives. They move to a place called
Illalong, near Yes. Now, looking at the map and
the historical context, this location seems pivotal
to me. It wasn't just some quiet backwater tucked
away in the hills. No, it was positioned... Right
on the main drag. The main drag. Precisely. Illalong
was right near the main overland route between
Melbourne and Sydney. You have to remember, the
railway network wasn't fully connected yet. There
were no highways. This dirt road was the lifeline
of the colony. So as a boy, Patterson isn't just
seeing sheep and gum trees. He's sitting at his
front gate watching the arterial blood of the
colony flow past. Paint the picture for us. What
is he actually seeing from that front gate? Okay,
so he's seeing the machinery of colonial transport.
First, he's seeing the bullet teams. Which are
what, exactly? For someone who's never seen one.
These are massive heavy wagons hauling tons of
wool or supplies. And they're pulled by these
huge teams of 12, sometimes 20 oxen bullocks.
They move incredibly slowly. They're immensely
powerful. And the men who drove them, the bullockies,
were famous for their colorful language and their
toughness. The truckers of their day. A very
slow version, yes. And then on the other end
of the speed spectrum, he's seeing the Cobb and
Co. coaches. Ah, Cobham Co., legendary. Think
of it as the Wells Fargo stagecoach of Australia.
There were the mail carriers, the passenger transport,
the high -speed connection to the outside world.
These coaches would come rattling through in
clouds of dust, changing horses at stations,
bringing news, mail, and, you know, interesting
strangers from the city. It's like living on
the side of Route 66 in the 1950s, or next to
a major truck stop today. He's just watching
the world go by. And perhaps most significantly
for Patterson's future work, he saw the drovers.
Another term we need to pin down, drover. A drover
is a specialist stockman who moves livestock
over long distances on the hoof. So they aren't
farmers who stay in one place behind a fence.
They are these nomadic experts who drive thousands
of sheep or cattle, hundreds, sometimes thousands,
of miles to market. They were the cowboys of
the Australian bush. Right, but often dealing
with much harsher terrain and longer distances.
They were legendary figures. And Patterson is
just a kid, watching this parade of rough -and
-tumble characters go past his house every day.
Specifically, he watched the horsemen from the
Snowy Mountains and the Murrumbidgee River area.
Now, these weren't just farmhands. These were
men who lived in the saddle. The terrain in the
Snowy Mountains is steep. It's scrubby. It's
incredibly dangerous. To ride there, you needed
a level of horsemanship that was almost acrobatic.
And he saw them showing off their skill. He saw
them at local picnic races and at polo matches.
That's the spark, isn't it? That's where the
obsession begins. He's a kid fanboying over these
guys who can ride anything, jump anything, go
anywhere. It's the origin story of the man from
Snowy River archetype. He was idolizing these
horsemen long before he ever wrote a word about
them. It absolutely imprinted on him. He saw
a kind of nobility in their skill, in their connection
with their horses. But there's another side to
his upbringing that we really can't ignore. OK.
Despite this rough environment, he wasn't uneducated,
not by a long shot. His mother. Rose Isabella
Barton, was Australian born and very well connected.
She was actually related to Edmund Barton. Wait,
Edmund Barton? As in the guy who would eventually
become the very first prime minister of Australia?
The very same. Wow. OK, so Patterson isn't just
some random bush kid. He has blood ties to the
emerging political elite. That Barton middle
name carried some weight. And his education really
reflects that. He started with a governess at
home, then went to a local bush school at Binalong,
but eventually the family scraped together the
resources to send him to Sydney Grammar School.
The big city. A huge change. He moves from the
dust of Yass to a cottage in Gladesville called
Rock End to attend this prestigious private school.
Which is a heritage site now. You can still visit
it. Right. He's doing well. He's a good student,
a sportsman. He was captain of the rugby team,
I believe. But then... We hit a snag, a failure
that I think is really, really important to his
trajectory. Yes. At 16, he sat for the scholarship
examination for the University of Sydney, and
he failed. Which honestly makes me like him more.
The great literary genius flunked his entrance
exam. Well, it was a classic sliding doors moment,
wasn't it? If he had passed, he might have gone
into academia. He might have become a dry scholar
of classics or a professor of history. And we
might never have gotten Clancy the Overflow.
Possibly not. Because he failed the scholarship,
the family couldn't afford to just pay his way
through university. So he had to get a job. He
had to enter the real world immediately. He needed
a paycheck. Exactly. So he entered into a legal
clerkship. He started right at the bottom rung
of a Sydney law firm. He studied law the hard
way while working and was eventually admitted
as a solicitor in 1886. So for a significant
part of his young adult life, Andrew Barton Patterson
wasn't a poet. He was a lawyer. He was drafting
contracts, dealing with wills, sitting in an
office wearing a stiff collar and a suit. A very
different picture from the man on the horse.
Which brings us perfectly to part two of our
deep dive, the double life. Because this duality
is the thing that really defines him for me.
By day, he's Mr. Patterson, the respectable solicitor,
handling disputes and paperwork. But by night?
He's the banjo. It is a classic superhero dichotomy,
isn't it? He started writing poetry around 1885
and submitting it to the Bulletin. Now, we cannot
overstate the importance of the Bulletin in the
1890s. What was the vibe of the Bulletin? Was
it a newspaper? A magazine? What was its place
in the culture? It was a weekly magazine, but
its nickname was the Bushman's Bible. It was
radical. It was nationalist. It was funny. And
it was incredibly popular. It was the primary
cultural touchstone for the entire colony. It
was where the Australian conversation was happening.
If you wanted to be read, if you wanted to be
part of that conversation, you published in the
bulletin. And Patterson didn't use his real name.
He signed his poems, The Banjo. Now, if you didn't
know the backstory, you'd think maybe he played
the instrument. But tell them where the name
actually came from. It was the name of his favorite
racehorse. I just love that. It's so unpretentious.
It's like if I wrote serious, heart -wrenching
poetry about the soul of the nation and signed
it Fido or Sparky. But it fits his character
perfectly. It's a little bit self -deprecating.
It ties back to that love of horses he developed
as a kid at Illalong. It's signal to the reader,
I'm not a stuffy academic poet from the university.
I'm a bloke who likes the track. And under this
pseudonym, he became a sensation. Sensation might
be an understatement. We're talking about the
1890s here. There's no internet, no TV, no radio.
Poetry was a form of pop culture. He publishes
Clancy of the Overflow in 1889 and then The Man
from Snowy River in 1890. And people went absolutely
nuts for this stuff. How nuts are we talking?
The numbers back it up. When his first collection,
The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, was
published in 1895 by Angus and Robertson, it
sold 5 ,000 copies in just four months. In a
colony with a pretty small population, it's viral
status. That's like a platinum record today.
The banjo became a household name. He was giving
people something they desperately wanted. And
that brings us to the why. Why was he so popular?
This connects directly to his famous relationship
and rivalry with Henry Lawson. Ah, the rap beef
of the 1890s, Lawson versus Patterson. This is
one of my favorite parts of Australian literary
history. It was a fascinating dynamic. They were
friends. They drank together. But they represented
two very different philosophies about what Australia
was and what it should be. They even had a poetry
slam of sorts in the pages of the bulletin, writing
poems back and forth, attacking each other's
view of the bush. So break it down for us. What
was the core of the disagreement? It was about
the reality of bush life versus the romance of
it. Henry Lawson, who wrote these famous, stark,
short stories like The Drover's Wife, portrayed
the bush as hard, unforgiving, and bleak. Right.
He focused on the struggle, the poverty, the
loneliness, the mud. He wrote about the silence
that drives people mad. He saw the tragedy in
it. Lawson is like the gritty documentary filmmaker.
Yeah. He's saying, look at this starvation. Look
at this despair. Stop pretending it's some grand
adventure. Whereas Patterson, Patterson was the
romantic. He was influenced by poets like John
Farrell. He saw the Bushmen as a hero, an underdog,
tough, independent, stoic, riding free across
these vast sunlit plains. In Patterson's world,
the Bush was a place of adventure and freedom,
not just misery and hardship. Clancy of the Overflow
is the perfect example of this. You've got the
narrator stuck in a dingy little office in the
justy dirty city, which is obviously Patterson
projecting his own feelings about being a lawyer.
Clearly. And he's just wishing he was out droving
with Clancy. Exactly. And he sees the vision
splendid of the sunlit plains extended. That
line. That one line, it makes you want to quit
your job and buy a horse immediately. It's pure
escapism. And that is why Patterson won the popular
vote, so to speak. Australia was forming its
national identity at this time. Remember, Federation
is just around the corner in 1901. The separate
colonies were about to become a single nation.
And the country wanted to look in the mirror
and see the man from Snowy River, capable, brave.
dashing. It didn't necessarily want to see the
broken down struggle that Lawson depicted. Even
if Lawson's view was arguably more realistic
for the average farmer or drover's wife, Patterson
gave Australia the hero it wanted to be. He invented
the Aussie legend. He certainly crystallized
it. But here's the great irony. While he was
building this national myth of the jolly swag
man and the free -riding bush man, his own personal
life was about to get very, very complicated.
And this leads us to the dark, soapy story behind
the most famous song in Australian history. Waltzing
Matilda. The unofficial national anthem. Everyone
knows the tune. Everyone knows the chorus. Once
a jolly swag man camped by a billabong. But the
story of how it was written. It plays out like
a season finale of a drama series. It really
does. It takes us to 1895. Patterson is at the
absolute height of his fame. He travels north
to Queensland to a place called Dagworth Station,
which is near the town of Winton. He's not traveling
alone, though. This is key. He's with his fiancee.
Sarah Riley. Sarah Riley. And they had been engaged
for eight years. Eight years. That is a massively
long engagement. Even for the 19th century, you
have to wonder why they hadn't tied the knot
yet. Indeed. It suggests a certain hesitation,
perhaps on his part. So Banjo and Sarah go to
Dagrid Station. Sarah is there to visit her old
school friend, a woman named Christina McPherson.
So the cast is set. The famous poet, his long
-suffering fiancé, and the fiancé's best friend.
This has all the makings of a disaster. And it
was. Christina McPherson had recently been to
a race meeting in Warrnambool, Victoria. While
she was there, she heard a band playing this
really catchy tune, a Scottish marching tune
called the Craigielee, most likely. It got stuck
in her head. A classic earworm. Yes. So back
at Dagworth, she's playing this tune on an auto
harp. An auto harp. For those wondering, that's
a zither -like string instrument. Very. Parlor
music chic for the 1890s. Very. And Banjo hears
it. He likes the rhythm. And inspired by a story
he'd heard at the station about a striking shearer
who had committed suicide in a waterhole rather
than be captured by police for stealing a sheep.
Okay, that's a much darker origin than I think
most people realize. Oh, it's very dark. The
Great Shearer's Strike was a violent quasi -civil
war in the outback. So Patterson takes that story
and starts writing lyrics to fit Christina's
music. We should probably pause and just explain
the lyrics for anyone who doesn't know them because
they are actually quite rebellious. They really
are. A swag man is a drifter, a transient worker
carrying his swag or bedroll. He steals a jumbuck,
which is just a slang term for a sheep to eat.
The squatter. The rich landowner comes down with
the troopers, the police, and rather than go
to jail, the swag man jumps into the billabong,
the waterhole, and drowns himself. It is a song
about class warfare. It is fundamentally anti
-authority. It celebrates the thief over the
police. So you've got Banjo and Christina, heads
together over the auto harp, collaborating, laughing,
making this rebellious music together. And meanwhile,
Sarah Riley, the fiancé of eight years, is...
Where? Well, she was there and she presumably
wasn't happy because the outcome of this creative
little visit was explosive. The engagement to
Sarah Riley was abruptly called off. Dumped at
the station after eight years. And Patterson
was suddenly asked to leave the property. He
was effectively kicked out. Wow. That is not
the behavior of a respectable gentleman solicitor.
Historians and biographers have looked at this
for years. The consensus is pretty clear. Patterson
was known to be a bit of a womanizer, and he
almost certainly engaged in a scandalous romantic
liaison with Christina McPherson right under
his fiancée's nose. The scandal. So, Waltzing
Matilda. This wholesome song we teach to kindergartners
was written by a lawyer who was busy cheating
on his long -term fiance with her best friend.
It creates a fascinating juxtaposition. The song
is so innocent in the public consciousness, you
know, a jaunty tune about freedom. But its birth
was steeped in betrayal and social disgrace.
And what happened to Sarah Riley, the jilted
fiance? She never married. She was reportedly
devastated by the whole affair. It's a tragic
side note to this jaunty national anthem. It
really changes how you hear the song. It adds
this entire layer of forbidden romance and heartbreak.
But Patterson doesn't seem to slow down to mourn
the relationship. He doesn't just go back to
drafting wills. The late 1890s arrive and the
world is changing. There's a war brewing. The
Second Boer War in South Africa. And this is
where Patterson sheds the lawyer's skin almost
completely. He leaves the law behind to become
a war correspondent. This is a huge pivot. He's
essentially becoming a foreign correspondent
for a major, major conflict. He signs on with
two of the biggest papers, the Sydney Morning
Herald and The Age. He sails to South Africa
in October 1899. And this isn't Zoom reporting
or, you know, sitting in a hotel in the capital.
He is on the ground on a horse right in the thick
of the action. And the Boer War was a nasty conflict.
British Empire versus the Boer Republics. Guerrilla
warfare, commando raids. It was very dangerous.
It was. And because of his fame and his charm,
Patterson wasn't just observing from a distance.
He was rubbing shoulders with the heavyweights
of the British Empire. He met Lord Kitchener,
Lord Roberts, General Haig, and he met other
correspondents who would go on to be absolute
legends. Who did he run into? Well, Winston Churchill,
for one. Winston Churchill. And Rudyard Kipling.
Can you just imagine the dinner conversation?
Banjo Patterson, Rudyard Kipling, and a young
Winston Churchill, who was also a journalist
at the time, right? He wasn't the prime minister
yet. No, Churchill was covering the war for the
Morning Post. That trio represents three fascinatingly
different views of the British Empire. You've
got Kipling, the imperialist cheerleader. Churchill,
the ambitious politician -in -waiting, and Patterson,
the Australian nationalist observing the mother
country at war. That is a power trio. And Patterson
wasn't just tagging along. He was getting scoops.
He was a very effective correspondent. He was
actually the first correspondent to ride into
Bloemfontein after its surrender. That's a massive
scoop. He beat everyone else, including Churchill,
to the punch on that one. He sent back these
graphic grouping accounts of the relief of Kimberley
and the capture of Pretoria. His writing style,
that observational, punchy, descriptive style
he'd honed on the Bush ballads, made his war
reporting incredibly vivid for the readers back
home. He didn't write in dry military jargon.
He wrote about the smell of the dust and the
sound of the horses. And speaking of vivid details,
there's a story that came out just recently in
2020 that I absolutely love. It involves chocolate.
Ah, yes, the Queen Victoria chocolates. Tell
the listener about this because this humanizes
him so much for me. So in 1900, Queen Victoria
commissioned a gift for her troops serving in
South Africa. These were tins of Cadbury chocolates.
It was a morale booster, a personal gift from
the monarch to the soldiers on the front line.
Here's some chocolate. Sorry about the dysentery
and the bullets. Essentially, Patterson, being
a correspondent embedded with the troops, received
one of these tins. But here's the strange part.
He didn't eat them. He kept them. In 2020, researchers
at the National Library of Australia were going
through Patterson's papers, which had been donated
years prior, and they found the tin. And inside...
The chocolates were still there. A 120 -year
-old chocolate, still in the straw packing, a
little decayed perhaps, but fundamentally intact.
That is just wild. Why did he keep them? Was
he a hoarder? Was he sentimental? Or did he just
think British chocolate tasted bad? I think it
speaks to a certain sentimentality and a sense
of history. He was a collector of experiences.
He kept that tin for 40 years until his death.
It was a tangible link to that high adventure
period of his life. He knew even then that he
was living through a major historical moment.
It's such a human detail. He's this tough war
correspondent writing into captured cities. But
he can't bring himself to eat the Queen's chocolate.
After the Boer War, his adventures continued.
He also covered the Boxer Rebellion in China,
where he met the famous correspondent George
Chinese Morrison. He really was a true global
adventurer in these years. He eventually returned
to Sydney and became an editor for the Evening
News and the Town Country Journal. But the call
of the bush, that clancy lifestyle. It never
really left him, did it? Because in 1908, he
makes another huge life change. He decides to
stop just writing about the bush and actually
try to live it. He does. He abandons journalism
and the city. He moves his family he had finally
married to a woman named Alice Emily Walker in
1903 to a 16 ,000 hectare property near Yowes.
16 ,000 hectares. That is a serious spread. That's
not a hobby farm. He's trying to be the grazier
his father was. He's trying to be the man from
Snowy River for real. But again, as we discussed
with his father's story, the reality of the bush
is hard. He lived there for a few years, but
it wasn't a permanent success in the way his
legal or literary career was. It was difficult
work. And then the world went to war again. World
War I, 1914. Patterson is in his 50s now. He's
not a young man anymore. He's a national celebrity,
a middle -aged father. Most men his age would
sit this one out. But he was desperate to go.
He felt a duty or maybe a need for that adrenaline
again. He tried to get a job as a correspondent
in Flanders covering the Western Front, but he
couldn't secure the position. Denied. But he
doesn't give up. No, he puts his ego aside. And
this is the part of his story that really impresses
me. This famous man, this national icon, signs
up as an ambulance driver for the Australian
Voluntary Hospital in France. That is humility.
From war correspondent hanging with Churchill
to driving an ambulance in the mud. There's no
glory in that. None at all. Eventually, though,
the army realized who he was and, more importantly,
what he knew. His specific skill set was finally
recognized. He was commissioned in the second
remount unit. The remount unit. That sounds like
horses. Exactly. Horses. We forget that World
War I was still powered by horses. The army needed
thousands of them for the cavalry, for transport,
for pulling artillery. And they needed someone
who knew horses inside and out to manage them,
train them, and transport them. Who better than
the banjo? It's poetic. Literally. The man who
wrote the Bible on Australian horsemen spends
the Great War taking care of the army's horses.
He rose to the rank of major. He transported
horses to Africa, China, and Egypt. He was the
commanding officer of the remount unit based
in Cairo. It fits him perfectly. While the young
men, the Clancy's of the next generation, were
in the trenches at Gallipoli or the Somme, Patterson
was ensuring the animals he loved so much were
cared for. And his wife Alice wasn't just sitting
at home knitting either. No, she joined the Red
Cross and worked in an ambulance unit near him.
It was very much a family commitment to the war
effort. So he comes back in 1919. He's seen two
major wars. He's tried to live the Bush life.
He's been a lawyer. He's a celebrity. What does
a guy like that do in the 1920s? retire this
is one of the most surprising twists in his entire
career he pivots again he becomes a sports journalist
what he started covering rugby league for the
sydney sportsman banjo patterson the bush poet
covering the footy that is absolutely amazing
the man from snowy river analyzing a scrum at
Redfern Oval. It just shows his adaptability.
He was a professional writer. He wrote what people
wanted to read. He wasn't precious about high
art. If the story was rugby league, he wrote
about rugby league. He understood the Australian
working class. They loved poetry in the 1890s
and they loved rugby league in the 1920s. He
followed the audience. He really was a working
journalist right up until the end. He was appointed
a commander of the British Empire, a CBE in 1938,
finally getting that official royal recognition.
And he passed away in 1941 of a heart attack
right there in Sydney. Leaving behind a legacy
that is, frankly, staggering. Let's talk about
that legacy. Part six, works and legacy. Obviously,
the poems are the. core of it. Clancy, Snowy
River, Mold Bull's Bicycle, the Geebum Polo Club.
I mean, these are poems that are taught in almost
every Australian school. They are part of the
vernacular. Even if you don't read poetry, you
know the rhythms and you know the stories. And
he also wrote novels like An Outback Marriage
and The Shearer's Cult and the children's book
The Animals Noah Forgot. But the cultural impact
is so far beyond the books. We started with the
$10 note. That's a high honor. But consider this.
In 1983, when astronauts on the space shuttle
columbia wanted to broadcast a song from space
to earth the first australian song played from
orbit what did they play don't tell me a rendition
of waltzing matilda by the country music legend
slim dusty banjo went to space his words did
and then you have the films the man from snowy
river movie in 1982 it starred jack thompson
who By the way, has released wonderful audio
recordings of Patterson's poems. That movie was
a massive international hit. It revitalized the
myth for a whole new generation who maybe hadn't
read the poems, but loved the visual spectacle
of it all. And the mystery poem. We mentioned
the chocolates, but they also found a previously
unknown poem in a Boer War diary back in 2008.
Yes. It just shows that there is still material
out there. He was so prolific writing in diaries
and notebooks and letters that we are. still
discovering his work almost a century after his
death. So we've unpacked a lot. We've gone from
the flug at Norambla to the law offices of Sydney.
We've seen him write a viral hit, break a heart
at Dagworth Station, ride into Bloemfontein with
the army, drive ambulances in France, and report
on rugby. It is a life of remarkable breadth
and contradictions. What's the big takeaway for
you? If you had to sum up Banjo Patterson, not
the icon of the banknote, but the man, what do
you see? I see a man who was a master of observation
and adaptation. He saw what Australia wanted
to be, and he gave it to them in beautiful, rhythmic
verse. He didn't just document the country, he,
in many ways, invented a version of it. He created
the archetype of the stoic, capable horseman.
And even though he was a city lawyer for much
of his life, he understood that deep longing
for the vision splendid. He bridged the gap between
the city and the bush better than anyone else.
He was the ultimate storyteller. He sold the
dream. He was the man from Snowy River. But he
was also the sophisticated guy who could navigate
a royal reception or a scandalous love affair.
He contained multitudes. He was a complex man
who created a simple, powerful mythology. And
perhaps that is why he endures. We need the myth.
And that leaves us with something to think about.
I'm going to leave you with this one final thought.
Consider waltzing Matilda again. It is the song
that represents the Australian spirit to the
world. A song about a swag man, a drifter, who
chooses death over capture. Freedom at all costs.
An anti -authoritarian streak. But it was written
by a solicitor. A man of the law. A man who was,
at that very moment, navigating a complex web
of social expectations, class, and personal betrayal.
It is a profound contradiction right at the heart
of our unofficial anthem. And maybe that's the
point. Maybe national identity isn't about facts.
It's about the stories we choose to tell ourselves.
We choose the swag man, not the solicitor. We
choose the romance, not the reality. So what
does that say about us? What does that say about
the stories we choose to cherish? A question
worth pondering. Indeed. Thanks for joining us
on this journey through the Ballad of the Banjo.
It's been a pleasure. See you in the next Deep
Dive.