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Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson in Albany: Literary Giants at the Edge of a Nation.
By Tanya McColgan | 3 Aug 2025
Two of Australia’s most iconic literary voices, Henry Lawson (1867-1922) and A.B. "Banjo" Paterson (1864–1941) are best remembered for capturing the spirit, struggle and stories of a young Australia. Though most often associated with the bush life of New South Wales and Queensland, both men have enduring links to Albany, a place that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, stood as a gateway between Australia and the world.
What is less widely known is that Henry Lawson lived and worked in Albany during 1890 and 1891, employed as a journalist with the Albany Observer, now Albany Advertiser. During his time in the town, Lawson immersed himself in the rhythms of daily life, writing local news and reflections, while also composing poetry that was infused with his trademark sense of place, solitude and observation.
The poem written during his stay, was “On the Summit of Mount Clarence” a reflective and atmospheric piece inspired by his time overlooking King George Sound. In it, Lawson captures the vastness and quiet majesty of the southern landscape, blending his usual bush realism with a profound sense of stillness and awe.
On the Summit of Mount Clarence
On the summit of Mount Clarence rotting slowly in the air
Stands a tall and naked flagstaff, relic of the Russian scare—
Russian scare that scares no longer, for the cry is “All is well”—
Yet the flagstaff still is standing like a lonely sentinel.
And it watches through the seasons—winter’s cold and summer’s heat,
Watches seaward, watches ever for the phantom Russian fleet.
In a cave among the ridges, where the scrub is tall and thick
With no human being near him dwells a wretched lunatic:
On Mount Clarence in the morning he will fix his burning eyes,
And he scans the sea and watches for the signal flag to rise;
In his ears the roar of cannon and the sound of battle drums
While he cleans his gun and watches for the foe that never comes.
And they say, at dreary nightfall, when the storms are howling round
Comes a phantom ship to anchor in the waters of the “Sound”,
And the lunatic who sees it wakes the landscape with his whoops,
Loads his gun and marches seaward at the head of airy troops—
To the summit of Mount Clarence leads them on with martial tread,
Fires his gun and sends the Russians to the mustering of the dead.
— Henry Lawson, 1891
This poem stands as a rare literary impression of Albany in the 1890s, offering a moment of quiet contemplation that contrasts sharply with the often harsh and dry world depicted in Lawson’s inland writing. It shows the versatility of his voice and the influence of Western Australia’s coastal grandeur on his imagination.
Henry Lawson’s poem “Oh! Old Chum” is one of his lesser known but reflects Lawson’s deep appreciation for friendship and the emotional toll of loss and isolation, recurring themes in his work. It is a poignant reminder of the hardships endured by men on the road, particularly in the 1890s, when Lawson himself was experiencing poverty, depression and disillusionment. During his time in Albany, Lawson was already grappling with many of these themes. He had travelled west seeking stability and briefly worked at the Albany Observer. While this poem was likely written later, it resonates with the kind of emotional reflection that may have been nurtured during his quieter, contemplative moments in Western Australia.
Oh! Old Chum
Oh! old chum, you’re gone to rest,
And the sun goes down in the golden west.
I fancy I see your familiar face
In the old bush camp and the old bush place.
Oh! old chum, the ways are parted
And the friends are far away;
But the world is wide and weary,
And the track is long and grey.
I fancy I hear your voice again
In the wind that whispers through wood and plain.
I think of the yarns we used to spin,
And the laugh that rang with a right good din.
I think of the hearts that were brave and true
In the days when we were a matey two.
Oh! the road was long and the nights were cold,
But the fire of friendship kept out the old.
And now I’m tramping the track alone,
With a heavy heart and a heavier tone.
There’s a shadow lying across the sun
Since the time you told me your race was run.
But maybe, old chum, at the end of strife,
We’ll yarn again in the after-life.
— Henry Lawson
Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson was more than a poet, he was a war correspondent, soldier, sportsman, lawyer and a keen observer of the human condition. Paterson’s connection to Albany was fleeting and honorable. He is known to have passed through our port town in 1905 during a voyage to England, one of many notable figures to do so when Albany was still Australia’s main entry point for international steamers.
In late 1914, as troops and war correspondents gathered for the long voyage to an uncertain war, Banjo Paterson was already a household name across Australia, known for beloved verses like “Waltzing Matilda,” “The Man from Snowy River,” and “Clancy of the Overflow.” Paterson found himself aboard a troopship bound for the battlefields of World War I. Like tens of thousands of Australians during that period, he passed through Albany.
Initially, Paterson intended to serve as a correspondent, but upon reaching the front, he instead enlisted as an ambulance driver with the Australian Voluntary Hospital, a role he fulfilled with characteristic dedication and courage. He was present during the Gallipoli campaign, one of the most harrowing chapters in Australia’s military history.
Although Paterson did not see direct combat, his time at Gallipoli exposed him to the full brutality of war. Paterson, transported wounded soldiers under fire, navigated the chaos of beach landings and witnessed the grim cost of Australia’s
involvement firsthand. These experiences left a deep impression on him and tempered the romantic nationalism that had coloured much of his earlier work.
During his wartime service, Paterson also served in France and Egypt. He later served with the 2nd Remount Unit, Australia Imperial Forces positioned initially in France, where he was wounded and reported missing in July 1916 and later as commanding officer of the unit based in Egypt overseeing the management of war horses, a role suited to his lifelong love of horsemanship. He rose to the rank of major and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1919 for his service.
Though Paterson’s time in Albany was brief, it links him to a key chapter in the town’s and the nation’s history. As the last port of call for thousands of soldiers headed to Gallipoli, the Western Front and the Middle East. Albany became a place of farewell and reflection. In later years, Paterson would recount the dignity and spirit of those who served, not from the front lines of battle, but from the difficult roles that supported them, such as ambulance driving, nursing and logistics.
Paterson never published a poem specifically about Albany, but his wartime writings echo the emotional complexity of that moment in 1914, hope mixed with fear, duty paired with uncertainty. Albany was the last Australian landscape many soldiers ever saw and for Paterson, it was a place of departure on a journey that would forever change his understanding of heroism, hardship and the Australian character.
His wartime experience marked a shift in tone in his post war writings. While he remained known for his bush ballads like “The Man from Snowy River” and “Clancy of the Overflow,” the Banjo who returned from Gallipoli was more subdued, reflective and world weary and gone was the wide eyed bush romanticism of the 1890s. In its place came a deeper, sometimes quieter nationalism, shaped by sacrifice and service by the Anzacs.
In the 1890s, Henry Lawson and Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson found themselves at odds in what became one of the most well known literary exchanges in Australian history. Dubbed the “Bulletin Debate”, this spirited clash of perspectives played out in the pages of The Bulletin, a Sydney-based publication known for championing nationalist and anti imperialist views, and for nurturing emerging Australian writers.
The heart of the debate centred on their conflicting portrayals of the Australian bush. Lawson, shaped by personal hardship and deep disillusionment, wrote stark and gritty stories that emphasised isolation, poverty and despair in rural Australia. He rejected romanticised visions of bush life, instead depicting it as a harsh and unforgiving environment that bred loneliness and hardship. In poems such as “Up the Country” (1892), Lawson directly attacked what he labelled the “City Bushmen”, writers like Paterson, who, in his view, idealised the bush from a safe distance.
Up the Country
I am back from up the country—very sorry that I went—
Seeking for the Southern poets’ land whereon to pitch my tent;
I have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track,
Burnt a lot of fancy verses, and I’m glad that I am back.
Further out may be the pleasant scenes of which our poets boast,
But I think the country’s rather more inviting round the coast.
Anyway, I’ll stay at present at a boarding-house in town,
Drinking beer and lemon-squashes, taking baths and cooling down.
`Sunny plains’! Great Scott!—those burning wastes of barren soil and sand
With their everlasting fences stretching out across the land!
Desolation where the crow is! Desert where the eagle flies,
Paddocks where the luny bullock starts and stares with reddened eyes;
Where, in clouds of dust enveloped, roasted bullock-drivers creep
Slowly past the sun-dried shepherd dragged behind his crawling sheep.
Stunted peak of granite gleaming, glaring like a molten mass
Turned from some infernal furnace on a plain devoid of grass.
Miles and miles of thirsty gutters—strings of muddy water-holes
In the place of `shining rivers’—`walled by cliffs and forest boles.'
Barren ridges, gullies, ridges! where the ever-madd’ning flies—
Fiercer than the plagues of Egypt—swarm about your blighted eyes!
Bush! where there is no horizon! where the buried bushman sees
Nothing—Nothing! but the sameness of the ragged, stunted trees!
Lonely hut where drought’s eternal, suffocating atmosphere
Where the God-forgotten hatter dreams of city life and beer.
Treacherous tracks that trap the stranger,
endless roads that gleam and glare,
Dark and evil-looking gullies, hiding secrets here and there!
Dull dumb flats and stony rises, where the toiling bullocks bake,
And the sinister `gohanna’, and the lizard, and the snake.
Land of day and night—no morning freshness, and no afternoon,
When the great white sun in rising bringeth summer heat in June.
Dismal country for the exile, when the shades begin to fall
From the sad heart-breaking sunset, to the new-chum worst of all.
Dreary land in rainy weather, with the endless clouds that drift
O’er the bushman like a blanket that the Lord will never lift—
Dismal land when it is raining—growl of floods, and, oh! the woosh
Of the rain and wind together on the dark bed of the bush—
Ghastly fires in lonely humpies where the granite rocks are piled
In the rain-swept wildernesses that are wildest of the wild.
Land where gaunt and haggard women live alone and work like men,
Till their husbands, gone a-droving, will return to them again:
Homes of men! if home had ever such a God-forgotten place,
Where the wild selector’s children fly before a stranger’s face.
Home of tragedy applauded by the dingoes’ dismal yell,
Heaven of the shanty-keeper—fitting fiend for such a hell—
And the wallaroos and wombats, and, of course, the curlew’s call—
And the lone sundowner tramping ever onward through it all!
I am back from up the country, up the country where I went
Seeking for the Southern poets’ land whereon to pitch my tent;
I have shattered many idols out along the dusty track,
Burnt a lot of fancy verses—and I’m glad that I am back.
I believe the Southern poets’ dream will not be realised
Till the plains are irrigated and the land is humanised.
I intend to stay at present, as I said before, in town
Drinking beer and lemon-squashes, taking baths and cooling down.
— Henry Lawson, 1892
Paterson, in turn, responded with poems like “In Defence of the Bush”, arguing that Lawson’s view was unreasonably bleak and that the bush, while tough, was full of character, beauty, and nobility. Paterson’s writing, full of lively drovers, clever horses, and galloping verse, captured the romance and myth of the bush and helped shape Australia’s cultural identity in the lead up to Federation.
Defence of the Bush
So you’re back from up the country, Mister Lawson, where you went,
And you’re cursing all the business in a bitter discontent;
Well, we grieve to disappoint you, and it makes us sad to hear
That it wasn’t cool and shady — and there wasn’t plenty beer,
And the loony bullock snorted when you first came into view;
Well, you know it’s not so often that he sees a swell like you;
And the roads were hot and dusty, and the plains were burnt and brown,
And no doubt you’re better suited drinking lemon-squash in town.
Yet, perchance, if you should journey down the very track you went
In a month or two at furthest you would wonder what it meant,
Where the sunbaked earth was gasping like a creature in its pain
You would find the grasses waving like a field of summer grain,
And the miles of thirsty gutters blocked with sand and choked with mud,
You would find them mighty rivers with a turbid, sweeping flood;
For the rain and drought and sunshine make no changes in the street,
In the sullen line of buildings and the ceaseless tramp of feet;
But the bush hath moods and changes, as the seasons rise and fall,
And the men who know the bush-land — they are loyal through it all.
But you found the bush was dismal and a land of no delight,
Did you chance to hear a chorus in the shearers’ huts at night?
Did they “rise up, William Riley” by the camp-fire’s cheery blaze?
Did they rise him as we rose him in the good old droving days?
And the women of the homesteads and the men you chanced to meet –
Were their faces sour and saddened like the “faces in the street”,
And the “shy selector children” — were they better now or worse
Than the little city urchins who would greet you with a curse?
Is not such a life much better than the squalid street and square
Where the fallen women flaunt it in the fierce electric glare,
Where the sempstress plies her sewing till her eyes are sore and red
In a filthy, dirty attic toiling on for daily bread?
Did you hear no sweeter voices in the music of the bush
Than the roar of trams and ‘buses, and the war-whoop of “the push”?
Did the magpies rouse your slumbers with their carol sweet and strange?
Did you hear the silver chiming of the bell-birds on the range?
But, perchance, the wild birds’ music by your senses was despised,
For you say you’ll stay in townships till the bush is civilised.
Would you make it a tea-garden and on Sundays have a band
Where the “blokes” might take their “donahs”, with a “public” close at hand?
You had better stick to Sydney and make merry with the “push”,
For the bush will never suit you, and you’ll never suit the bush.
— Banjo Patterson, 1892
While the feud was poetic and intellectual, it reflected a deeper national conversation about class, hardship, identity, and what it meant to be Australian. In hindsight, the “clash” was less about who was right and more about representing the two faces of the nation. Lawson gave voice to the battler, the loner, and the underdog, while Paterson celebrated mateship, freedom, and the rugged charm of the outback.
Despite their differences, both men helped define Australia’s emerging literary voice. Together, their works continue to shape how generations have understood the nation’s landscape and character. Their so-called “War of Words” remains one of the most significant and defining moments in Australian literary and cultural history.