Remembering the Past Australia

Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson c. 1890

When I was sent to school in Sydney a new world opened before me. As a start my cousin and I bought an old boat, mostly held together by tar, and by way of brightening up the colour scheme we painted the floor with white paint over the tar. This was not entirely satisfactory, as the tar turned the paint to a sort of unwholesome muddy colour, which refused to dry; so then we had to buy caustic soda to remove both tar and paint and begin all over again. When we got her finished she was a fine fishing boat, for there was generally as much water inside as out, which kept our fish fresh till we got them home.

BUT fishing was only a sideline; our real interest lay in the scullers who worked on the championship course right in front of our door. Beginning with Hickey and Rush, on down through Ned Trickett and Elias Laycock, to Beach and Hanlan, Stanbury and Maclean, last and greatest of them all, Harry Searle — we knew every man of them, and could tell them by their styles at three-quarters of a mile distance.

Stalking with their trainers through the little town of Gladesville, they were like Kingsley's Gladiators stalking through the degenerate Romans. Elias Laycock could eat a dozen eggs for breakfast; Maclean, an axe-man from the northern rivers, could take an axe in either hand, and fell any tree without stopping for rest; Searle had an extra rib on either side of his body, or so his opponents implicitly believed. A flaxen-haired giant, he was the hero of a queer incident at a dance given at the Gladesville Mental Hospital. These dances were for the amusement of the patients, and all visitors were expected to dance with them. A lady from Sydney, no less than a daughter of Sir William Windeyer, Judge of the Supreme Court, was very good-natured about it all, and after trotting several of the patients out she invited Searle to have a turn.

On coming back to her chaperon she said "What a pity that fine young man is mad. He talked quite sensibly until all of a sudden he said that he was the champion sculler of the world. I got away from him as soon as I could!"

These great scullers were mostly young country men reared on home-grown food, and it would be hard to find their equals in these days of flats and tinned vegetables. The discovery of Beach, the Dapto blacksmith, was due to Dr. Fortescue, a great surgeon of those days, who had his home on the Parramatta River.

Somebody brought Beach to see him, and the doctor said that he had never seen such a perfect physical specimen. "This man," he said, "will beat that little Canadian" (Hanlan). He backed his opinion with his money, too, helping Beach to get boats and a trainer. Hanlan was so superior to all other scullers that the cognoscenti on the River declared that he must have a secret machine in his wager boat to help him along. This idea was about as sensible as the theory that the Germans, during the Great War, had a wireless transmitting station up a gum-tree in the Blue Mountains; but people would believe anything in those days, and, for that matter, so they will now.

I went to the Sydney Grammar School, where I succeeded in dividing the Junior Knox prize with a boy who is now a Judge of the High Court.. If I had paid as much attention to my lessons as to fish and rabbits, I too, might have been a Judge of the High Court. There is a lot of luck in these things!

Sydney Grammar School, College Street, Sydney 1870

Leaving school, I had a try for a bursary at the University, but missed it by about a mile and half, so I had to go into a lawyer's office. Here I began to learn more of the world. We did a lot of shipping business and one of my first jobs was to go out and gather evidence for the defence of a captain who was prosecuted for not showing a riding-light over the stern while at anchor. Evidence! It was too easy. The captain had seen the boatswain put out the riding-light. The boatswain remembered that riding-light well, as he had nearly fallen overboard while fixing it. The chief officer had been strolling about the deck and had noticed the reflection of the riding-light on the water. I chuckled to think how small the opposition would feel when we unloosed our battery of testimony.

Then the sea-lawyer who was on the Bench, without whys or wherefores, and without summing-up, found the captain guilty and fined him a fiver!

I walked away from the court with the captain, and was just starting to speak a piece about this awful iniquity when he said: "Oh, well, I didn't know you had to have a riding light. They'd drive a man mad with their regulations in these —— places." An unnerving experience, but it taught me that a case at law is like a battle: If you listen to the accounts of the two sides you can never believe that they are talking about the same fight.

Later on, I became managing cleric for a big legal firm which did the work for three banks in the depression which preceded the dreary days when the banks themselves had to shut. For months I did nothing but try to screw money out of people who had not got it. Then I went into practice for myself, and, of course, was confronted by closed banks. I saw bank booms, land booms, silver booms, Northern Territory booms, and they all had one thing in common — they always burst. My partner and I had banked some money for a client in the Bank of New Zealand, and we were told that "she was sure to shut." We shifted the money into another bank and the New Zealand concern weathered the storm, while thc bank into which we had put the money folded up like a blanket!

We managed to keep going even through the depression and when a cavalry officer came out from England and started a polo club we took to the game like ducks to water. This polo business brought us in touch with some of the upper circles — a great change after the little bush school, the game-cocks, and the days when I looked upon the sergeant of police as the greatest man in the world.

We played a match against the Cooma team, real wild men with cabbage-tree hats, and skin-tight pants, their hats held on by a strap under their noses. I must have had the gift of prophecy because, before we went up, I wrote a jingle called "The Geebung Polo Club," a jingle which has outlasted much better work. But this reminds me that it is time to say something about writing.

Up to the time of my arrival in Sydney, my experiences of life had been limited to contacts with the unsophisticated children of Nature. Had I learnt anything from them? Have I learnt anything worth while in the sixty years or so which I have lived since? I take leave to doubt it. There was a time when they called these people the "great unwashed," but I think that the "great unsatisfied" would be a better name. Fully ninety per cent. of people have neither as much money nor as high a social position as that they would like, or (as they think) deserve. In those hard times nobody was satisfied, so I thought — like Hamlet — that it was up to me to set the world right. I read heavily in history and economics, and the outcome was my first literary effort — a pamphlet called "Australia for the Australians." I blush every time that I think of it!

When my pamphlet fell as flat as the great inland desert, I tried my hand at "poetry," and strung together four flamboyant verses about the expedition against the Mahdi, who was going well and strong at the time. As "The Bulletin" was the most unsatisfied paper in Australia, I sent them to that paper. I had adopted the pen name of "The Banjo," after a so-called racehorse, which we had on the station. I was afraid to use my own name lest the editor, identifying me with the author of the pamphlet, would dump my contribution, unread, into the waste paper basket.

My verses actually appeared, and in the same issue was a request that I would call on the editor. Off I went, and climbed a grimy flight of stairs at 24 Pitt Street, until I stood before a door marked, "Mr. Archibald, Editor."

On the door was pinned a spirited drawing of a gentleman lying quite loose on the strand with a dagger through him; and on the drawing was written: "Archie, this is what will happen to you if you don't use my drawing about the policeman!" It cheered me up a lot. Evidently this was a free and easy place.

Anyone who wants to know what Archibald looked like should see his portrait by Florence Rodway in the Sydney Art Gallery (View the portrait: Art Gallery of NSW). It is a marvellous likeness of the bearded and bespectacled Archibald, peering at a world which was all wrong. Not that he ever put forward any concrete scheme for setting it right; he diagnosed the diseases, and left others to find the cure.

In an interview of ten minutes he said he would like me to try some more verse. Did I know anything about the bush?

I told him that I had been reared there. "All right," he said, "have a go at the bush. Have a go at anything that strikes you. Don't write anything like other people if you can help it. Let's see what you can do." And that is how I came to meet Henry Lawson.

Henry Lawson was a man of remarkable insight in some things and of extraordinary simplicity in others. We were both looking for the same reef, if you get what I mean; but I had done my prospecting on horseback with my meals cooked for me, while Lawson had done his prospecting on foot and had had to cook for himself. Nobody realised this better than Lawson; and one day he suggested that we should write against each other, he putting the bush from his point of view, and I putting it from mine.

Henry Lawson  7 June 1867 – 2 September 1922

"We ought to do pretty well out of it," he said. "We ought to be able to get in three or four sets of verses each before they stop us."

This suited me all right, for we were working on space, and the pay was very small — in fact, I remember getting exactly thirteen and sixpence for writing "Clancy of the Overflow" — so we slam-banged away at each other for weeks and weeks; not until they stopped us, but until we ran out of material. I think that Lawson put his case better than I did, but I had the better case, so that honours (or dishonours) were fairly equal. An undignified affair, but it was a case of "root hog or die."

To show how a poet can be without honour (or profit) in his own country, I remember Lawson's wife telling me that she was quite happy because Henry was "working" again. "What's he working at," I asked, "prose or verse?"

"Oh, no," she said. "I don't mean writing, I mean working. He's gone back to his trade as a house painter."

And this was the man whose work was afterwards translated into foreign languages!

Lawson had an experience which happens to few people. He fell over a cliff at Manly and was reported dead. There was no time to make inquiries, so a section of the Press came out with very flattering obituary notices, which Henry read with great interest and enthusiasm. I asked him what he thought of these final "reviews;" and he said that, after reading them, he was puzzled to think how he had managed to be so hard up all his life!

Other celebrities of the day were Hopkins and Phil May. Except that they were both self-taught artists, they were as unalike as possible in every way. A large expansive person named Traill had taken a chance on going abrand and hiring Hopkins in America and Phil May in England. Hopkins was of the large, somnolent type; but give him an idea for a comic picture and he would make three jokes grow where only one grew before. May was a bundle of nerves and vitality, wearing himself out before his time. He had learnt his drawings by practising on costers and street-arabs in London.

Hopkins had been reared on a farm in Ohio, and had then, in the American way, taken a job as conductor on a sleeping car so that he might see the world. He practised on the passengers, and one has a vision of Hopkins peering round the corridor and working by fits and starts. I think it was Andrew Carnegie who said that, with a bag of oatmeal and determination, a man could teach himself anything. I took Hopkins on a trip — I suppose he would have called it a buggyride — down through the rough country to the head of the Murrumbidgee Uiver. He compared everything unfavourably with Ohio, until, down on the river flats. I showed him a crop of maize which reduced him to civility. He had to get out of the buggy and handle the maize before he would believe that it was real. Also he said that there was nothing to draw in this unspeakable stringybark wilderness until we passed an old deserted wool-shed built of slabs and bark, with a big beam sticking out through the top as a lever to press the bales. He said that this in itself was worth the trip, and he spent an hour drawing it, and made an etching which I wish I had now. Some day, somebody will begin collecting old Australian work, and these little etchings by Hopkins will come into their own.

Sources:

1. "BANJO" PATERSON TELLS HIS OWN STORY—2. GIANTS OF THE PADDLE, PEN, AND PENCIL. (1939, February 11). The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), p. 21.
2. Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson c. 1890; Photographer: Falk, Sydney; Courtesy: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
3. Sydney Grammar School, College Street, Sydney 1870; Courtesy: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
4. Henry Lawson c.1900 - Contributor: Sir John Longstaff 1861-1941 - Reproduced by special permission of the Trustees of the National Gallery, Sydney - Courtesy State Library of Victoria