Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, was an Australian bush poet, journalist and author, widely considered one of the greatest writers of Australia's colonial period.
Banjo Paterson, circa 1890
Paterson as a baby with his nanny, Wiradjuri girl Fanny Hopkins, mid-1860s
The Gladesville cottage Rockend, where Paterson lived in the 1870s and 1880s
This portrait of Paterson is reproduced on the Australian ten-dollar note.
The bush ballad, bush song, or bush poem is a style of poetry and folk music that depicts the life, character and scenery of the Australian bush. The typical bush ballad employs a straightforward rhyme structure to narrate a story, often one of action and adventure, and uses language that is colourful, colloquial, and idiomatically Australian. Bush ballads range in tone from humorous to melancholic, and many explore themes of Australian folklore, including bushranging, droving, droughts, floods, life on the frontier, and relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Cover of Old Bush Songs (1905), Banjo Paterson's seminal collection of bush ballads
First page of "The Dying Stockman," a bush ballad published in Banjo Paterson's 1905 collection The Old Bush Songs
Adam Gordon
Henry Lawson