The Australian $10 NoteBanjo Patterson and Dame Mary Gilmore
Banjo Patterson and the Story of Waltzing Matilda
As we move toward a cashless society and physical money is being slowly phased out of everyday use, I wanted to pause and take a look at who are the faces who have had the honour of making it onto our money. Today we will look at the man of the $10 note. A man with a musical instrument for a name and, who among other things, is famed for writing the unofficial Australian anthem. None other than Banjo Patterson.
Banjo was not his real name. He was born Andrew Barton Patterson. When he began writing for The Bulletin as a journalist, he stated to use the pen-name “Banjo”. And he adopted that name, because his family owned a racehorse that was called “The Banjo”.
Banjo, the man not the horse, was born in 1864, which is interesting because out of the 9 faces that appear on the Australian currency 5 of them were born in the 1860s, I guess the money makers must have had a thing for this period in Australian History.
The first time I remember hearing about Banjo Patterson, was a children’s book we had in the 1980s of his poem Mulga Bill’s Bicycle, then there was the classic 1982 The Man from Snowy River movie, that was based on his poem of the same name. I still vividly remember the scene where Jim rides his horse down a seemingly vertical mountainside.
In his lifetime, Banjo Patterson was a journalist, a poet, novelist, a war correspondent for the Boer War and then in the First World War, when he was in his 50s, he served as an Ambulance Driver, an army vet and eventually as a captain. In his younger years he was also a bit of a sportsman playing tennis and rowing and because of his horsemanship he was an excellent polo player.
But what I would like to zoom in in today, is that famed song, the surprisingly morbid ballad about a sheep stealing wonderer that somehow speaks the heart of the Aussie battler in us all.
The poem, Waltzing Matilda was first written in 1895. But to be honest, it was a bit of a slow burn. Three years later, the newspapers would still have articles that explained the Aussie slang used. “The swagman or tramp of Australia is an independent individual. His home is on the plain beside a waterhole or billabong. He is indifferent to the higher influences of civilisation. He carries his swag and waltzes Matilda (as he terms his water-bag) with… ease and grace.” The Adelaide Observer somewhat unhelpfully explained that “Waltzing Matilda” means the same thing as “Humping Bluey”. Goodness? I am not sure that clarifies anything for me. Anyway, by 1901, the year of Federation, a Rockhampton newspaper reported, “A bush poem entitled “Waltzing Matilda” is all the rage here just now.”
If you are not familiar with the song Waltzing Matilda, here is a little summary. It is the story of a tramp, making a cup of tea on an outdoor fire by a waterhole. A sheep comes for a drink and so he takes the opportunity to steal the sheep. The farmer and mounted police arrive and so, he jumps into the waterhole to escape, but instead drowns. His ghost then haunts the waterhole.
However, the song is reported to have a much deeper inspiration. You see in the early 1890s there was a lot of trouble between the sheep shearers and the pastoralists– or farm owners. In 1890 in a story about the sheep shearer’s union, a newspaper reported that the inventions of new technology threatened the jobs of skilled shearers. “But now.. [with] the aid of machinery anyone with only the slightest, practice, can remove the wool from the
sheep’s back.” These tensions came to a head in 1894 at a place called Dagworth in Western Queensland. According to the Truth newspaper, one wool-shed was burned down and unionists fired shots at another wool-shed whereby the owners “replied to the shots”. I am assuming that they replied to the shooting with bullets of their own. The newspaper appears to be very anti-unionist and reports of a shearer’s death as follows, “[The] Next morning the body of a man named Hoffmeister, a prominent Union agitator, was found about two miles from Kyruna. Hoffmeister was quite dead when found.” Quite dead. A magisterial inquiry into the death found that Samuel Hoffmeister, originally a Dutch South African, did indeed take his own life by shooting himself with his Martini Sport’s Rifle. Other unionists who were present at the woolshed attack testified to say that “‘Frenchy,’ as he was called, was decidedly ‘queer,’ [or] ‘balmy,’” Balmy is an old Australian slang for eccentric. They also said that that evening ‘Frenchy’ had screwed up a letter and thrown it in the fire before mumbling something and walking off into the night. That was the last they saw of him.
There is also another story from the Dagworth area that is said to inspire the poem. Five years earlier in 1890, there was another horse-riding swagman called Burke, who was quite well known to police. One day a station owner found Burke’s horse near a waterhole, but Burke was nowhere to be found. 6 months later, when the water levels dropped, they found Burke’s body, his foot was caught in the roots of a Coolabah tree and he had drowned.
Our poet, Banjo Paterson came to stay at the Dagworth station a few months after the Union troubles and the death of Hoffmeister. So, Banjo seems to have taken a bit of artistic licence and pieced together two of these local stories and crafted them into the ballad of Waltzing Matilda. One last observation, can I just say that I love the fact that the unofficial anthem of Australia was inspired by a place called Dagworth. I wonder just how much a dag is worth?
This Kelly Chase, on the Case.
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Dame Mary Gilmore and the New Australia Colony
Mary Jean Cameron was born in New South Wales 1865, yes, she is another one of those 1860s babies who are on the money. Another currency coincidence is the name Mary. There are 2 Marys featured on notes plus Queen Elizabeth’s middle name is also Mary.
Now here is an interesting link to Banjo Paterson from the flip side of the note. In the last episode, if you recall I was talking about the sheep shearers unions and that Banjo Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda was partially inspired by an incident involving unionised sheep shearers. Well Mary Gilmore was an active supporter of the shearer’s strikes among many other unions.
Mary Gilmore was a very interesting woman. She spent her whole life helping people and being a voice for underprivileged communities. Interestingly, she was also the great, great aunt of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Mary went to school in Wagga Wagga and at 16 years of age she became a trainee teacher, but she failed her teacher’s exam the next year and took a year off, but then, showing true resilience, she tried again and worked as a teacher until 1895. The problem was that the Department of Public Instruction had very strict rules concerning what teachers could speak about openly and because she had a passion for writing about social justice issues this posed a problem. So, during this period she protected her teaching career by using pen-names.
But instead of diving into her social activism, I want to pause and dig a little deeper into a quirky little chapter in Mary’s very long life where in the early 1890s she became a devotee of the New Australia Movement. Basically, the New Australia Movement was a group of progressive minded colonists from Australia who believed that there should be a utopian classless society. It was spearheaded by a chap called William Lane who ran a newspaper called the Worker that was based in Brisbane. Mary was quite in awe of William Lane and after meeting him she wrote in her journal that he was, “earnest, strong in conviction, generous … and tender hearted.” She explained that some men help to bring out the best in you and that he was, “a man whose utter kindliness abides. It is good to have touched his hand.” Needless to say, she was a big fan.
At this time in Australia, as I mentioned earlier, there was a lot of unions forming to fight for the fair treatment and fair wages of workers. But William Lane had an idea that he could start fresh and set up a new socialist society where everybody was equal. Rather than fixing the inequality problems in Australia, they would start fresh in the New Australia. It even had its own currency.
So, they decided that Paraguay in South America would be the perfect spot to set up this New Australia Colony and 400 people moved there to start living this utopian life. Mary Gilmore was among those people. With her teaching experience, she was going to teach in the New Australia School. Spoilers, this ideal society was kind of problematic and didn’t work out. The troubles started as early as the boat ride over to South America and developed into even worse troubles over time. About 2 months in 3 men were expelled from the community for drinking alcohol because New Australia was a temperance society which meant it was an alcohol-free zone. 81 of the settlers didn’t even last the first few months. Then because there was so many grievances about the way that William Lane was running the colony, he decided to start a break away settlement called Cosme.
During this period, Mary was doing a lot of the writing and correspondence about the success of the New Australia colony and having it sent back to Australia to be published. I assume these writings were meant to encourage like-minded people to immigrate to New Australia.
It is important to note that when Mary moved to the colony, she was 30 years old and still single. This might seem OK now, but back then, it pretty much meant she was going to be a spinster forever. She wrote that her three options were, “the desolate regions of old maidism… the devil… [Or] marriage and probable misery.” But she was secretly a romantic and also wrote, “my being craves for the more substantial food of married life”. In the New Australia Colony, she met her husband and ex-sheep shearer Will Gilmore who has been described as a fine, sturdy, lovable man.’ He had actually injured himself on the colony whilst saving some children and Mary was tasked with reading to him while he recovered from his injuries. They were married, had a child and when the New Australia Colony was on the verge of collapse, they moved back to Australia.
Upon her return, she had a job writing and editing a Women’s column for the Australian Worker. And she stayed in this job for more than 20 years. It did not pay particularly well, but she supplemented her income with other forms of writing. One of those was poetry and, in her lifetime, she published 8 books of poetry and more than 800 poems. It is hard for us these days to imagine how popular poetry was at this time, but let’s put it this way, both of the people who are featured on the $10 notes were so famous for their poetry that they ended up being immortalised on the money.
But Mary Gilmore did not keep all of the profits from the sales of her poetry. After World War One she wrote a book of poetry called “The Passionate Heart” and she donated all of her royalties from the sale of the book to returned soldiers who had been blinded in the war. Her writings were a voice for the underprivileged; returning soldiers, Aboriginal People, children in the welfare system and women fighting for equal rights and in 1937 she became a Dame and was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire- the first Australian to be granted the award for services to literature.
Upon her death in 1962, she lived to 97 by the way, she was even given a State Funeral. A State Funeral is a public ceremony that is paid for by the State government in order to honour people who are of great national significance. The funeral was attended by many important people including the Prime Minister of the day Robert Menzies.
This Kelly Chase, on the Case.