Having gone to the USA for my first, second, fourth, fifth, eighth and fourteenth choices, and Ireland for my third and fifteenth, Scotland for my sixth, England for my seventh, ninth, tenth and twelfth, Canada for my eleventh, and Australia for my thirteenth, I choose to go back to the Australia again for my sixteenth.
It is a song based on a poem by the celebrated Australian bush poet A.B. Paterson. He was a poet with an impressive body of work, probably the best known being the words of Waltzing Matilda. This was for a brief time the de facto national anthem for those Aussies not happy singing the pre-1984 national anthem, God Save The King/Queen.
So today, I will start with Paterson’s 1889 poem that became the great song of the same name: and unusually for a poem, when set to music years later, absolutely no liberties were taken with the text. One can see why: to mess with a perfect lyric like this would be sacrilege. And so when Aussie singer songwriter John Wallis came up with a melody to die for (one that totally brought out the rhythm and reinforced the sublime internal rhymes of this master lyricist)... well, then he knew he had a winner.
Here is that poem...
Clancy Of The Overflow Words: Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson (Later) Music: John Wallis I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago, He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him, Just "on spec", addressed as follows: "Clancy, of The Overflow". And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected, (And I think the same was written in a thumbnail dipped in tar) 'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are." In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars. I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall, And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all. And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street, And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet. And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy, For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste. And I somehow fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy, Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go, While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal - But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of "The Overflow". [End]
Gee, that is heady stuff, is it not? And as it was written as a poem, I want first to look at/listen to a couple of readings of it. But before I ask you to look/listen though, I want to relate a personal anecdote.
I owe a great debt here to one of my two late brilliant brothers: the ‘Aussie’ one... who was honoured by his second home country by being given The Medal of the Order of Australia, several years before he died in 2018. Clive Woosnam (OAM) emigrated to Australia as a 24 year old in 1964. For four decades, he was a famed educator in Newington College, one of Australia’s most exclusive schools, where apart from his considerable teaching role, he coached their junior rugby union team. And he took credit for choosing the positions for two of the very young boys starting out in the game: Nick Farr-Jones he decided to put at scrum half, and Phil Kearns at hooker. Both went on in adult life to captain their national team on a world stage in those very same positions, and both held the Rugby World Cup aloft.
Full marks to Clive for his prescience... not just in sport, but also in choosing poetry for his younger brother. For it was he, in about 1966, who sent me an anthology of Aussie poetry as a Xmas present. And he asked me to particularly zone-in on two of the poets: Henry Lawson, aka the ‘Poet of the People’, and A.B. Paterson, aka as ‘Banjo Paterson’.
And my heart was immediately surrendered to Banjo Paterson's marvellous poem "Clancy of the Overflow". I have never read a greater Australian poem.
And I proselytise like mad, about it. I try to get every Brit I know to read it and commit it to memory.
But I did not ignore contemporary Aussie poets. And one that I much admired was the writer of this interesting poem sent me by Joe Dolce back in the day (circa 2009):
'... FAME We were at dinner in SoHo and the couple at the next table rose to go. The woman paused to say to me, I just wanted you to know I have got all your cookbooks and I swear by them! I managed to answer her, Ma'am, they've done you nothing but good! which was perhaps immodest of whoever I am. ...'
Now, let me tell you a story of sorts re the writer of that amusing little piece. The late Les Murray (or ‘Les A. Murray’, as I always think of him, since when I first encountered his work, he always used the middle initial that he was later to drop) had long been a favourite poet of mine.
But ‘an admirer for many years’, mattered not, for I went off him with a rush following his visiting Britain somewhere around the start of the millennium.
Here is how he fell from grace with me...
Knowing that the BBC were asking listeners to suggest Aussie poems for an Australian edition of their radio programme "Poetry Please", I wrote in to ask for the Banjo Paterson masterpiece.
And guess what? Les A Murray was on a visit to Britain at the time, and he came in to the studio to read the poem.
And he killed it stone dead!
He read it like a "speak-your-weight" machine.
He should have been horsewhipped for such sacrilege!
So, in an effort to get justice a quarter century later, here in the next link, is the writer himself - Banjo Paterson, from the grave - reading his own poem, with the wit that Murray so lacked.
Don't bother with looking at the gimmick of the animated old picture: instead, ignore the YouTube screen and search out the masterpiece laid out in red text at the start of this piece above, and (silently) read the words of the poem along with the author...
BTW, I told that great Scots folksinger Archie Fisher some years ago, that his setting of the Roger Quin poem "Borderland" is fine as it goes, but that the poem was a complete lift from this Paterson gem!
Archie had not realised, as he was not (at the time) aware of "Clancy's" existence.
Now, not everybody is happy with just reading the poem. Some want to work-in some musical backing... stopping short of actually putting a melody to the words. They do this with mixed results...
Here first is Aussie comedian Adam Hills making a decent stab at delivering the words, but for some reason getting his wife to interpose between his verses, (trading verse for verse), her delivery of the song Under The Milky Way. She has a sweet enough voice (albeit for an Aussie, I found her American-tinged accent a bit bewildering), but the result to my ears at least, was total confusion, and it added little if anything to the poem. Judge for yourself...
And now a much more successful attempt from Jack Thompson. His reading strikes me as unbeatable: better even than Banjo’s... his timing is impeccable. Like a star footballer, he makes room for himself. He gets maximum meaning out of every word... indeed, every syllable. And the music here is sooo simpatico. How I loved the strings soaring at 2.30 to 2.52, immediately after the line
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.
Gee, you could feel yourself ‘going astral’. Look out here for that magical moment...
Now let’s look at attempts to turn the words into a song proper. I am quite taken by this version by Mundy-Turner. Cath Mundy has a richly expressive voice, and Jay Turner has penned a reflective melody... that works surprisingly well. But something is missing... could it be Banjo’s sheer... attack?
Before John Wallis came up with his tune, the best stab at turning the poem into a song came from Slim Dusty. Non Aussies might wonder who he was: suffice it to say that he was ‘Mr Country Music’ in Australia. So very famous.
This was his version...
But now we come to real perfection...
Here are Wallis and Matilda looking very dated in their 80s' gear, delivering the best example of the poem in song. Some may feel that John Wallis has stood on the shoulders of the Slim Dusty version, and they might have a point. Melodically they are first cousins, but Wallis has tweaked it and inserted ever-so-slight melodic, tempo and key change nuances... that make Slim’s earlier melody now less formulaic. Yet some might reckon that the Wallis ‘pop sound’ detracts somewhat from the sheer gravitas of this poem. But not me. I reckon it scores a bulls-eye.
Were ‘Banjo’ here to sing it, this is the tune he would sing it to alright. It captures the poem’s rhythm magnificently, and punches home those stunning internal rhymes... in a way that the late Slim Dusty never quite did.
I end my piece with this parting thought: wouldn’t it be great if Paterson was here today to sing it to his own banjo accompaniment? Great... but alas impossible. He died of a heart attack a fortnight short of his 77th birthday, having lived 4 months longer than I have at the time of writing this. A sobering thought, as it is touch and go if I outlive him, before succumbing to my own heart attack.
But the impossibility of him performing with his banjo in front of us today, is not just the time-travelling element. You see he would have to learn to play the banjo first... for Banjo, the pseudonym that he adopted for his literary works, was in actuality the name of his favourite... horse.
Heaven knows why that fact so amuses me, but it does.
On the offchance the last link proved too much for you to bear visually – I mean the miming and the fashion disasters... here is their studio recording, with lyrics onscreen.
TTFN. Dai Woosnam. Grimsby UK. 7th February 2024.
Photo Credits:
(1) Clancy of the Overflow (by YouTube);
(2) Dai Woosnam,
(7) John Wallis
(unknown/website);
(3)-(6) Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson
(by Australia Post).
