Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson was one of Australia's greatest poets. He worked as a journalist and was based in Sydney, but having been born in the outback of New South Wales he retained a romantic fondness for life in the bush.
His earliest works were published in The Bulletin, a magazine that was first published in Sydney in 1880. These generated enough interest for a collection to be published in 1895, and five more followed before his death in 1941.
Many of his poems have either been set to music, or were written to be sung to existing tunes, and Waltzing Matilda (which was written in January 1895, shortly before the publication of his first collection) is by far the best–known of them.
The tune of Waltzing Matilda was originally composed in 1818, for a Scottish ballad entitled The Bonnie Wood of Craigilee, which had been written in 1806. In January 1895, while Paterson was staying at Dagworth Station (ranch) in the Queensland outback, he heard the tune played on a zither (or autoharp) by 31–year–old Christina Macpherson, a member of the family that owned the station. She in turn had heard it played by a military band at a horse racing meeting in Victoria, the previous April.
Probably unaware that the tune already had words associated with it, Paterson decided that it deserved some, and wrote his own. They are believed to have been inspired by a true story from the Great Shearers' Strike, which had begun in 1891, during which Queensland came close to civil war. In September 1894 the woolshed at Dagworth was set on fire, causing the deaths of dozens of sheep. A shearer named Samuel Hoffmeister (known as 'Frenchy') was pursued into the outback by the owner of the station and three policemen, and his body was later found at a waterhole. He'd been shot through the roof of the mouth.
A hastily–arranged inquest quickly ruled suicide, and Paterson's lyrics promulgate the idea that the fugitive had committed suicide rather than be taken alive (even if they have him drowning himself in the billabong). More recently this verdict has been questioned, the suggestion being that he was captured and shot in cold blood by his pursuers.
Banjo Paterson's mother was born Rose Isabella Barton. She was related to Edmund Barton, who in 1901 became Australia's first Prime Minister.
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