Looking for Rose Paterson: How Family Life Nurtured Banjo the Poet
By Jennifer Gall
National Library of Australia Publishing, 2017
Reviewed by Graham McDonald
The Australian poet and writer Banjo Paterson spent much of
his childhood living on Illalong Station, near Binalong, north of Canberra.
Banjo’s father Andrew had owned the farm (along with two others) with his
brother until a combination of factors meant the properties had to be sold and
Andrew ended up as the manager of Illalong under new ownership. The family,
Andrew, his wife Rose and several children lived in the manager’s cottage, made
from timber slabs with a bark roof and stretched calico for ceilings.
Rose was an educated, middle class woman, whose family had
emigrated in 1840 and, like the Patersons, had taken up farming properties.
While managing Illalong paid reasonably well, the family’s physical surrounds
were primitive. With Andrew often away on farming business, Rose was left to
manage an ever growing household with the only the semi-skilled assistance of a
local girl as a servant. For 15 years, from 1873 until 1888 she wrote regularly
to her sister Nora, who lived a much more materially comfortable life in
Queensland. These lettershave ended up
in the National Library and provide a fascinating glimpse into rural life in
Australia of that period from a woman’s perspective. Jennifer Gall has woven
the raw material of the letters into a wide ranging view of late-nineteenth
century rural life.
The fact that it is Banjo Paterson’s mother writing the
letters means we know a lot of the ‘back story’ of where the family fits into
the society of the period, due to the several bjographies of Banjo. We would
not have that back ground with more anonymous. For all that, Banjo is little
more than a vague figure in the background of this book. It is about Rose and
more broadly the hard life of women living in the isolation of rural
communities.
Gall uses the letters as the starting point of explorations
of various facets of bush life: pregnancy, childrearing, medical and health
issues, domestic management and education. There is little of the heroics of
Clancy or the Man from Snowy River, this is a grim picture of a hard life. Yet
through all of this, there is a sharp intelligence and a wonderful sense of
humour in Rose’s letters to Nora.
Rose was dead by the time she was 50, simply worn out, one
can imagine, by living the life she did. Her letters and Gall’s detailed work
in placing them in the wider social context of the period have ensured that she
will be remembered as more than simply Banjo’s mother.
