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BANJO AND HENRY - THE PLAY
Banjo and Henry is a play based on the lives and works of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson. The play is set in two acts with an intermission. The running time of the two acts runs to around 90 minutes. This does not include the time of the intermission.
The play is based on facts around both of their lives. There are many aspects, that due to the time in which they lived, the exact details are not known. For this reason, where there is a lack of evidence or credible information, the text has been created for dramatic purposes.
The play begins at the start of their literary writing for the Bulletin and the journey that was undertaken by both men as a result of their profile being lifted to a national stage. It covers love, loss, marriage, heartbreak, alcoholism and dependence and how both men struggle to cope with notoriety for almost four decades.
If you would like information about staging Banjo and Henry contact me at john@jtmusic.com.au
Banjo Paterson
Andrew Barton Paterson was born on 17 February 1864 at the property "Narrambla", near Orange, New South Wales, the eldest son of Andrew Bogle Paterson, a Scottish immigrant from Lanarkshire, and Australian-born Rose Isabella Barton, related to the future first prime minister of Australia, Edmund Barton.
Banjo is approached by John Archibald, after reading his poetry, to write small articles for The Bulletin on 22nd August 1886. Archibald was also an advocate for the underdog as was Banjo. Archibald was to pay him seven shillings and sixpence a poem. He asked Banjo if he knew anything of the bush? Paterson told him he had been reared there. Archibald told him to start there and with anything that strikes you and don’t write anything like other people if you can help it.
Jules Archibald wrote to Banjo saying “I want you to remember that Australia is a big place, and I want you to write stuff that will appeal not only to Sydney people, but that will be of interest to the pearler up at Thursday Island and the farmer down in Victoria… Do not be afraid to cheer for the underdog in a fight”. Banjo resolved to write Australian stories for Australians, to cheer for the battler, to present the people and the places he knew in a heroic light.
Tucked away on page seventeen of the Christmas 1889 issue was Banjo’s last poem for the year. It appeared as an afterthought. But Banjo’s poem is immediately arresting from the fast tempo of its opening lines, which bound along with the infectious rhythms of a cantering horse. It celebrates the great Australian outdoors and the fortunate few who rode the wide-open spaces and for those who live for the free life, bolstered by the bush air and the sunshine.
The poem had its genesis in a letter of demand from Street & Paterson to a drover Banjo had met down at the Lachlan River area some years earlier. The letter was sent from a dusty, dingy office in a noisy, crowded city to a man unfettered by the bonds of urban life. One of the drover’s mates sent a letter back with handwriting so appalling it looked as if it had been composed with a thumbnail dipped in tar. The drover’s mate told the big city lawyers that the man in question had gone to Queensland droving, “and we don’t know where he are”. Banjo was hooked by the fractured grammar and the idea of a man roaming free, unconcerned about what was happening in the offices being choked by city's polluted air.
Banjo had received in the mail a hook on which to hang not just the best verses he had composed to that point, but also perhaps his most beautiful and evocative homage to the land he loved. He poured his heart into every line of his ode to the Australian bush and bushmen.
Banjo earned just 13 shillings and sixpence for Clancy of the Overflow, but it soon became a priceless treasure of Australian literature. More than anyone before him, Banjo had made the Australian stockman and drover, the equivalent of the American wild west cowboy, a hero for all Australians. A laconic, free spirit who lived a romantic life, beholden to nothing except the natural world around him.
The Man from Snowy River appeared on page thirteen of the 26th April 1890 issue of The Bulletin. Banjo would make some subtle changes to his work over the next few years as he tinkered with the rhythm, but the death-defying charge at the poem’s heart remains the same, and the courage, horsemanship and doggedness of the stripling as he hurtled down the mountain side was a key in the development of a national ethos. Not only was The Bulletin a champion for the little Aussie battler, but at the same time Banjo had created a hero for every Australian underdog striving to prove themselves.
At twenty-seven years old, Andrew Barton Paterson was still virtually anonymous in Australian literature. But his Bulletin pseudonym “The Banjo” was winning friends and influencing people right across the colonies. While he only made pocket money as a poet, he enjoyed the trappings of being a well-paid lawyer in a big city, surrounded by rich and influential friends and family. Although Banjo was engaged to Sarah Riley, he was very popular with young ladies.
His legal work gave him an enviable lifestyle, Banjo had long grown weary of it – he hated chasing money from people under pressure. And he hated representing creeps. Banjo would rather have been riding with the men from Snowy River than representing lowlifes and banks, but he escaped from the disagreeable cases and characters of the courtroom by writing and playing sport.
A battle between the two best-known poets in Australia putting forth their views on bush life. By 1892 Banjo and Lawson were literary celebrities, and Banjo was creating the template of the Australian bush hero as a national identity.
Archibald welcomed the idea for what became known as the Bulletin Debate as a way to stir controversy and spark further interest in his magazine around the colonies over the merits and miseries of the bush.
Lawson and Banjo continued to be luminaries of Australian poetry, but others were striving for some of the stardust. The battle between Banjo and Lawson became a literary sensation around Australia. Of the two verse men, some say that Lawson praised the town and lived in the bush, while Paterson praised the bush and lived in the town.
George Robertson wanted Angus & Robertson to be in business with Australia’s best-known versifier. The identity of “The Banjo” was an open secret in Sydney’s legal and sporting circles, but he remained largely anonymous in the wider community. That was about to change. Robertson had a plan to make Banjo Paterson the most famous man in Australia.
Street & Paterson was a successful law firm, but by is early thirties Banjo was starting to seriously question his career choices. Disillusioned with the law, Banjo was all ears when he and George Robertson got to talking in the Sydney offices of Angus & Robertson. Robertson planned two books: a collection of the old Australian bush songs, before they were forgotten, and a compilation of Banjo’s best work.
For the old bush songs, Banjo began writing to friends and colleagues in the literary sphere, among them Lawson, asking if they could contribute any morsels. He also began writing extra poems for a compilation of his best work; it was to be called The Man From Snowy River, built around his best-known verses to date.
HENRY LAWSON
Henry was born in Grenfell on 17th June 1867. Although his family name was Larsen, at Henry's birth the family name was changed to Lawson.
At around 9 yers of age Henry developed an ear infection which left him partially deaf. This deafness never left him and it deteriorated over the course of his life which made him feel isolated.
Lawson thought about the Australian colonies being beholden to a foreign monarch and started rolling words around in his head for a poem he would call Sons of the South, about a brotherhood among Australians and a rejection of British rule. By lamplight after work, Lawson wrote down the verses of his call to arms. He wrote the byline using just his initials “H.A.L.” and screwed up courage to go down to The Bulletin office at 24 Pitt Street after hours, intending to drop his work into the letterbox.
He arrived at a small, shabby brick building hidden away among ship chandleries, wool stores and fish shops, with the smell of a recent catch wafting down from the cramped alleyway just off Pitt Street. He climbed a narrow, dusty flight of stairs into a narrow and dusty passage, with hardly room for two men to walk abreast. But, just as Lawson was contemplating whether to deliver the envelope or take his poem home and have another look at the spelling, the door opened suddenly and a haggard woman stood there. Lawson shoved the poem into the cleaner’s hand and fled with embarrassment, like someone who was in a place where he didn’t belong.
By the age of eighteen, Lawson was painfully shy and extremely sensitive, sensitive about his deafness, his lack of education, his surroundings, his clothes, slimness and paleness, his h’s, handwriting, grammar, pronunciation (made worse by deafness) – everything almost.
He was terribly shy of strange girls too, and if a girl he knew took any notice of him he reckoned that she was only either pitying him or laughing at him.
The Drover’s Wife was the way that Henry Lawson saw the real Australia of the depression-hit 1890’s – a ceaseless struggle for the battler against overwhelming odds. Whether it was the gaunt bush woman fighting with every bit of strength she had to save the lives of her terrified children, or the pale, frail, factory boy being crushed by capitalism as he tried to help his destitute family, Lawson witnessed struggle at every turn. The fight by a little collection of colonies for republicanism against an ancient Empire; the mateship and larrikinism of the Australian worker – they all became fuel for the fire that blazed inside Lawson as he tried to truly portray the experiences of Australia’s poor and downtrodden.
By the time The Drover’s Wife appeared in the middle of 1892, Lawson was twenty-five and had established his reputation for pulling no punches in writing about Australian life as he saw it. The bush had been nothing but hard toil for Lawson since he could remember and he had heard more than enough about Banjo’s cracking whips, flying horses and loveable country rogues.
In the Drover’s Wife, Lawson could have been telling the story of Paterson’s mother Rose, who struggled through most of her short life on remote bush properties in danger and despair, bringing up children while her husband was away riding fences or droving.
The Bulletin’s two chief bards were usually on the edge of animosity, the pair initially treated their rivalry as a good-natured contest that could make them both a few quid.
The “write-off” had started with a handshake late in June 1892, a few weeks before The Drover’s Wife appeared. Paterson recalled “one day [Lawson] suggested that we should write against each other, he putting the bush from his point of view, and I putting it from mine. We ought to do pretty well out of it he said. We ought to be able to get in three or four sets of verses each before they stop us. This suited me all right, for we were working on space, and the pay was very small. So, we slam-banged away at each other for weeks and weeks; not until they stopped us, but we ran out of material.
The bush, Lawson argued, was full of treacherous tracks; dark and evil-looking gullies; dull, dumb flats and stony rises; lizards and snakes. It was either heat and dust or destructive floods. The paradise painted by men like Paterson was just a mirage.
The bush had moods and changes, Paterson explained, and Lawson would tell a happier tale if he saw the rains return and the dust bowls turn into fields of waving grass and the rivers transform into refreshing torrents. True bushmen, Paterson said, would be loyal through it all. Paterson’s rebuttal appeared in the same Bulletin issue as The Drover’s Wife.
Paterson said that Lawson had put his case about the bush better than I did, but I had a better case, so that honours (or dishonours) were fairly equal.
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