page_title: Banjo Paterson
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Banjo Paterson / Works
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of THE OLD BUSH SONGS: Composed and sung in the Bushranging, Digging, and Overlanding Days, edited by A. B. Paterson, Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robertson, 1906. Printed by Websdale, Shoosmith and Co., Printers, Sydney, Australia. Note: this is a 1906 edition, but this collection was first published in 1905.
context_page_description: Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, CBE was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author. He wrote many ballads and poems about Australian life, focusing particularly on the rural and outback areas, including the district around Binalong, New South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood. Paterson's more notable poems include "Clancy of the Overflow", "The Man from Snowy River" and "Waltzing Matilda", regarded widely as Australia's unofficial national anthem.
context_section_description: The publication of The Man from Snowy River and five other ballads in The Bulletin made 'The Banjo' a household name. In 1895, Angus & Robertson published these poems as a collection of Australian verse. The book sold 5000 copies in the first four months of publication.
  In 1895, Paterson headed north to Dagworth station near Winton, Queensland. Travelling with fiancée, Sarah Riley, they met with her old school friend, Christina Macpherson, who had recently attended a race at Warrnambool in Victoria. She had heard a band playing a tune there, which became stuck in her head and replayed it for Paterson on the autoharp. The melody also resonated with him and propelled him to write 
  "Waltzing Matilda" While there has been much debate about what inspired the words, the song became one of his most widely known and sung ballads.
  In addition, he wrote the lyrics for songs with piano scores, such as The Daylight is Dying  and Last Week. These were also published by Angus & Robertson between the years 1895 to 1899. In 1905, the same publishers released Old Bush Songs, a collection of bush ballads Paterson had been assembling since 1895.
  Although for most of his adult life, Paterson lived and worked in Sydney, his poems mostly presented a highly romantic view of the bush and the iconic figure of the bushman. Influenced by the work of another Australian poet John Farrell, his representation of the bushman as a tough, independent and heroic underdog became the ideal qualities underpinning the national character. His work is often compared to the prose of Henry Lawson, particularly the seminal work, "The Drover's Wife", which presented a considerably less romantic view of the harshness of rural existence of the late 19th century.
  Paterson authored two novels; An Outback Marriage (1906) and The Shearer's Colt (1936), wrote many short stories; Three Elephant Power and Other Stories (1917), and wrote a book based on his experiences as a war reporter, Happy Dispatches (1934).  He also wrote a book for children, The Animals Noah Forgot (1933)
  Contemporary recordings of many of Paterson's well known poems have been released by Jack Thompson, who played Clancy in the 1982 film adaptation of "The Man from Snowy River". While having no connection to the movie, an Australian television series of the same name was broadcast in the 1990s.
  Media reports in August 2008 stated that a previously unknown poem had been found in a war diary written during the Boer War.
caption: Cover to Paterson's seminal 1905 collection of bush ballads, entitled Old Bush Songs
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