Banjo Patterson Essay

Andrew Barton â€Å"Banjo† Paterson was an Australian bush poet, Journalist and Author. He focused most of his poem’s on Australian life, in the particular area of rural and outback areas, mainly places like Binalong and New South Wales where he grew up as a child. He was mostly famous from poems including Waltzing Matilda, The Man from Snowy River and Clancy of the Overflow. Banjo was born on the 17th February 1864 in â€Å"Narrambla†, near Orange, New South Whales. Banjo’s level of education as a child was relatively privileged. At a young age he attended a bush school which was ran by the governess. Then from 1874, he attended Sydney Grammar School, a prestigious school in the heart of Sydney. After finishing school, Paterson became an article clerk at a Sydney law firm, and was admitted as a solicitor in 1886. Paterson practiced as a solicitor until the early years of the twentieth century, by which time he had also developed a promising literary career. His earliest published work dates from 1885, when he submitted a poem criticising the British war in the Sudan (in which Australian troops were involved) to the Bulletin, a new literary journal with an Australian nationalist focus. Over the next decade the increasingly popular and influential Bulletin provided an important forum for the publication of Paterson’s verse, which appeared under the pseudonym ‘The Banjo’, adopted from the name of one of his favourite horses. By 1895 Banjo had written many poems and such as ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, ‘The Geebung Polo Club’, ‘The Man from Ironbark’, ‘How the Favourite Beat Us’ and ‘Saltbush Bill’ were so popular with readers that Angus & Robertson, published the collection, â€Å"The Man From Snowy River, and Other Verses†, in October. From which nearly all the context from these poems came from Banjo’s love for the out back in his home town Narrambla. The title-poem had swept the colonies when it was first published in April 1890. The book had a remarkable reception: the first edition sold out in the week of publication and 7000 copies in a few months; its particular achievement was to establish the bushman in the national consciousness as a romantic and archetypal figure. The book was as much praised in England as in Australia: The Times compared Paterson with Rudyard Kipling who himself wrote to congratulate the ublishers. Paterson’s identity as ‘The Banjo’ was at last revealed and he became a national celebrity overnight. While on holiday in Queensland late in 1895, Paterson stayed with friends at Dagworth station, near Winton. It was here were he wrote one of his most famous pieces of work in the history of his entire life, â€Å"Waltzing Matilda† This piece is now Australia’s best known folk song. And many say that this was the peak and the start of the decline in banjo’s career in poetry. He did not stop writing after this, in fact after this holiday he got offered an amazing career opportunity when he became a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald as a War correspondent. The quality of his reporting attracted the notice of the English press and he was appointed as a correspondent also for the international news agency, Reuters, an honor which he especially cherished in his later years. Then Back in Sydney in 1902, Paterson published another collection, Rio Grande’s Last Race, and Other Verses, and in November decided to abandon his legal practice. Next year he was appointed editor of the Sydney Evening News. Andrew Barton â€Å"Banjo† Paterson died on the 5th of February 1941. On the night of Paterson’s death, Vance Palmer broadcasted a tribute: ‘He laid hold both of our affections and imaginations; he made himself a vital part of the country we all know and love, and it would not only have been a poorer country but one far less united in bonds of intimate feeling, if he had never lived and written’.