Banjo Paterson

There are few Australians who cannot recall the opening lines of "The Man from Snowy River", and fewer still who are not familiar with the words of "Waltzing Matilda". But how much is really known of their author, Australia's most famous poet, Banjo Paterson? Colin Roderick combines the insight of long experience with painstaking research through family documents, unpublished records, archival papers and Paterson's own words to reveal the many factors and influences that made up Paterson's complex character. For generations Andrew Barton Paterson's ancestors had been soldiers and versifiers. Born into a tradition of piety and service, he was eminently fitted by temperament and character for the life of a soldier. Denied his chosen career by a childhood accident, Paterson trained as a solicitor but he was never happy in the law. Instead he became a frustrated man whose literary endeavours - his poetry and his reports as a war correspondent - were merely a substitute for the life and excitement he craved. After lying about his age to earn a commission to Egypt, Paterson returned to Australia in 1919, and joined forces with Ezra Norton as a director of Truth and Sportsman Limited.
He was editor of the Sydney "Sportsman" until obliged to retire just as the Great Depression began to bite. Thereafter his life followed a descending curve. Unlike his rival Henry Lawson, he died in relative obscurity, reticent to the end. Accident, Paterson said, made him a poet. "Banjo Paterson: Poet by Accident" reveals that he was a frustrated man, restless, chained by misfortune to a life of literary substitution, retreating within himself more and more as consciousness of his unfulfilled destiny took possession of his mind.