Banjo's Religion

​It's been said that when people settle in a new country, to feel at home, they have to fill the unfamiliar landscape with their own myths and heroes. Andrew ‘Banjo’ Patterson was one of the poets who sang larger-than-life figures from the bush into the heart-scape of Australia over a century ago, just as our rough colonies were melding into a nation.
 
The image of the intrepid man from Snowy River hurling his horse down a steep High-Country slope has been etched into the minds of generations of Australians. Schoolkids still delight in telling the story of the bearded bushie from Ironbark tricked into thinking his ‘bloomin’ throat had been cut’ by a wily barber.
 
Banjo’s melancholy song of the lone swagman throwing himself into a billabong to escape the police lingers on as our unofficial national anthem and tugs at the heart strings of Aussies a long way from home. And, somewhere in the back-country of our collective imagination, the carefree drover Clancy of the Overflow still sings as he musters cattle on sunlit plains stretching away and away.

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