Page:The Collected Verse of A. B. Paterson.djvu/295

 Though Gordon was perhaps the real founder of the ballad in Australia, it reached its finest flower and most characteristic expression in Paterson. First published in the Bulletin in the nineties, Paterson's verse has had a success without parallel in the literary annals of Australia. No writer of verse except Kipling can boast so wide a public.

Brought up on his father's station, and returning to country life after ventures in law and in journalism, Paterson had an intimate knowledge of life in the outback: he knew bushmen and he knew horses. (His pen-name "Banjo" was that of an old station racehorse.) His boundary-riders and shearers, his buckjumpers and station-hands, are real people—the first real Australians to appear, together with Henry Lawson's, in verse. He is an individualist with an enormous zest for life, and the vitality of the characters he creates has so imprinted itself on his readers' imagination that they might be said to belong to the folklore of Australia.

Apart from their historical significance in showing to a later generation the life and personalities of the droving days, in embodying the spirit and tradition of Australia's "golden age", the ballads are a delight to read. They have a perennial freshness that neither years nor literary cults can dim.

Andrew Barton Paterson died in 1941 at the age of seventy-seven. What better memorial could a man have in his country's life and annals than "Waltzing Matilda" and "The Man from Snowy River"?