Fiction · 1895
The Man from Snowy River
A prize colt breaks from its paddock and joins a mob of wild mountain horses, and every noted rider in the district gives chase — all but a slight, easily-doubted young stockman from high in the Snowy River country, the only one willing to follow the herd down a mountainside the rest call impossible. Forty-five more ballads follow the title poem: drovers, shearers, bushrangers, racehorses and the vast, indifferent Australian bush that shapes them all, in Paterson's own fast, rhyming, spoken-aloud verse.
Paterson wrote most of these poems, including replies in a good-humored "duel" of verse with fellow bush balladist Henry Lawson, for the Sydney Bulletin through the early 1890s. Angus & Robertson published the collection in Sydney on 17 October 1895; it went on to become, by some accounts, the best-selling volume of poetry ever published in Australia.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of the enlarged second edition, first published in 1902 (this text follows its 1913 printing): the prelude and all forty-six ballads.
Contents
- Note
- Preface
- Prelude
- The Man from Snowy River
- Old Pardon, the Son of Reprieve
- Clancy of the Overflow
- Conroy’s Gap
- Our New Horse
- An Idyll of Dandaloo
- The Geebung Polo Club
- The Travelling Post Office
- Saltbush Bill
- A Mountain Station
- Been There Before
- The Man Who Was Away
- The Man from Ironbark
- The Open Steeplechase
- The Amateur Rider
- On Kiley’s Run
- Frying Pan’s Theology
- The Two Devines
- In the Droving Days
- Lost
- Over the Range
- Only a Jockey
- How M’Ginnis Went Missing
- A Voice from the Town
- A Bunch of Roses
- Black Swans
- The All Right ‘Un
- The Boss of the ‘Admiral Lynch’
- A Bushman’s Song
- How Gilbert Died
- The Flying Gang
- Shearing at Castlereagh
- The Wind’s Message
- Johnson’s Antidote
- Ambition and Art
- The Daylight is Dying
- In Defence of the Bush
- Last Week
- Those Names
- A Bush Christening
- How the Favourite Beat Us
- The Great Calamity
- Come-by-Chance
- Under the Shadow of Kiley’s Hill
- Jim Carew
- The Swagman’s Rest
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1864–1941 · Modern
Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (1864–1941) was born at Narrambla, near Orange, New South Wales, and qualified and practiced as a solicitor before turning to journalism and verse, much of it published under the pen name “The Banjo” in the Sydney Bulletin. The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (1895) made him Australia’s most popular poet; he also wrote the words to the country’s best-known folk song, “Waltzing Matilda,” the novel An Outback Marriage (1906), and covered the Boer War as a correspondent. He was appointed CBE in 1939 for services to literature and appears on the Australian ten-dollar note.
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