Paterson had a happy knack not only of being readable but of being memorable. He created figures who were remembered, quasi-legendary figures like Clancy of the Overflow, Saltbush Bill (who gave rise, in turn, to the Joliffe cartoons) and the Man from Ironbark. Not only did those figures sidle into folk memory, so did the poems in which they appeared. Paterson was one of those poets who was regularly recited; if not, in the case of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, sung. As much as any writer ever could, Paterson has entered the Australian popular imagination. He is the man on the ten dollar note, the man who kept his hat on. And he has remained popular, certainly with the publishers. As the years roll by, so new editions are rolled out, many of them freely and colourfully illustrated – Paterson’s material is very visual.

For all that, he is not much remembered for his fiction. Viking has just reissued both An Outback Marriage, originally published in 1906, and The Shearer’s Colt, originally published in 1936. It is this second date that looms more significantly in terms of public access over copyright, and may well account for the latest flurry of activity. On the face of it, there is no special reason to retrieve two books that have somewhat less lustre than Paterson’s other publications. Yet whatever the grounds, reprints of our classic authors are always welcome, and because they are classic authors there is always something to be discovered in them.

Both books are dated, and there is some interest in inspecting them in terms of their different kinds of imaginative signature. The earlier book is very much of its time in its main narrative: a young English heiress arrives to take up her inheritance, a station not too far from the Murrumbidgee, which is surrounded by thieving small-holders, all with whiskers, Irish names and too many secrets. The young station manager is unable to see that he is the other half of the romantic interest, and we have to wait until the very last pages before that light dawns on him. Around this is a cast of bush characters: in addition to the two fractious clans of Donohoes and Doyles, a missing aristocrat determined on dropping out of sight, a heavy-drinking Chinese cook, a diva from the opal fields, a couple of tough cases and their molls from the Sydney push, and an entirely superfluous university man (Oxford triple blue), all clenched fists and jaw and frightfully reserved, who contributes almost nothing to the conversation. An unkind reviewer might say Paterson got that part right, but it wouldn’t impress my professor. His part is to find the heir to an English fortune, in a kind of reversal of the famous Tichborne case.

What this unprepossessing summary points to is something quite central to Paterson’s way of thinking, and arguably to that of his contemporaries, certainly that of Kipling. Paterson writes and thinks in terms of types – not necessarily in terms of stereotypes, though that tends to be the prescription whenever he is chasing after comic effect. Not too many of his characters are one-dimensional caricatures: Paterson is more accomplished than that. But, like Kipling in Kim, he is inclined to assemble a cast in which there is one of everything. That is, his characters become representative: types, in that sense. For example, the country lawyer (who has as many novels as law books on his shelves) is a man of splendid presence, with strong features et cetera, in a manner not too remote from the heroes in boys’ annuals. But with something more: he ‘has the contempt for other people’s skill and opinions which seems an inevitable ingredient in the character of brilliant men of a certain type’. The story first appeared as a serial in the Melbourne Leader in 1900, between Paterson’s tour of duty as a war correspondent in South Africa (1899–1900) and as a roving correspondent in China (1901–02). He had just ceased to practise law, and the lawyer’s depiction is more nuanced and troubled than is customary with him. This particular character has to be sufficiently worthy to be a likely competitor for the hand of the heiress; on the other hand, he has to have in him the seeds of his own self-destruction. He is more interesting than the simple mechanism of the plot requires, and that means his undoing ends up, inevitably, as melodramatic.

Which is not a long way from Paterson’s comfort zone. The later novel, The Shearer’s Colt, is more conspicuously given over to what one might think of as music hall obviousness, though a later comparison is proposed in the text itself, the type-obviousness of gangster movies. Quite a lot of the story is about horses, about what you can do with horses, and even more about how much money you can lose on them. It starts off out in the sticks, gradually finds its way to Sydney, and for the second half of the story relocates itself to London. There are any number of touts and con men about, but criminality works its way up the scale too: a heavyweight Chinese gangster with connections to the Tong, an Italian and a Spanish Mexican, tough-talking crooks from America. It is all rather fun. There is another of Paterson’s knuckle-headed Oxford men who tries a stint as a mounted trooper out on the Barcoo, and there is the titular shearer himself, Red Fred Carstairs, recently a millionaire, shrewd in some matters but a compulsive gambler. He’s our boy. There’s a baroness, a coarse peroxide blonde who was previously a celebrated music hall star; and a superior Englishman, Mr Noall, and so on.

At the centre of all the attention is a series of races between a horse from each of England, France, the United States and Australia. Even the horses are types, defining the national character. Paterson is sufficiently of his time and class to be impressed by the champion qualities of the English horse; ‘he had the indefinable gift of quality’, a bit like a Savile Row suit. The Australian horse is ‘a big, sleepy, good-natured giant’; you can almost imagine it with its legs crossed, leaning against the stable door with a fag hanging from its lip. It wins the big race, of course. Paterson is in his element, laying down all the different configurations of horses, and the different kinds of abilities they might have – not only at the level of international racing, but in the thick of buffalo hunting in the Northern Territory. The story line goes everywhere.

If the very horses are national types, it can hardly be a surprise that the dramatis personae are conscripted into a shorthand kind of characterisation. Specifically, we see Paterson having his fun with racial types – and he sails perilously close to racism. Remember that this is a novel from the 1930s (Red Fred has a battered old Ford, and shearers are beginning to get about on motorbikes). The ex-music hall star loudly announces that she is a Yid, and so is her financial adviser, this at the height of Roy Rene’s fame as Mo McCackie. It is an Australian joke that all Chinamen are called Pat. When the horses are led out in London and the bands start playing tunes appropriate to each horse, the Americans go wild. ‘Niggers in all directions started to cake walk.’ At moments like that you remember, and wish you hadn’t, Paterson’s bluntness in his ‘Bushman’s Song’: ‘It was shift, boys, shift, for there wasn’t the slightest doubt / It was time to make a shift with the leprosy about.’ Which is less sensitive, the language or the attitude?

This is writing that makes its impact through rapid recognition, as it gallops on to whatever happens next. And that is the very point about ‘Banjo’ Paterson. He does not look for new insights, but confirms existing emotions, and perhaps prejudices. He expects us to recognise his types; and the effect of that is to consolidate us into a unified, if not always coherent, readership. He is in fact creating his audience, defining us as something like a stereotype, too, assuming our national identity. So we are all meant to understand the loyalties of mateship and the iniquities of scab labour on the floors of the shearing sheds.

More passionately for Paterson, we are also meant to understand what love of country really is. He waxes lyrical about the beauty of the mountain country in each of its seasons: ‘In the clear, dry air all colours were startlingly vivid, and round the nearer foothills wonderful lights and shadows played and shifted, while sometimes a white fleece of mist would drift slowly across a distant hill, like a film of snowy lace on the face of a beautiful woman.’ There you can see what happens with him. He has written as passionately as Streeton painted, but then the closing conceit tames the whole down to the level of library fiction. He knows exactly what he is talking about when he talks about the country – the deceptive danger of galloping across an open plain, for example – but again and again he refers back to a pre-existing and not very sophisticated kind of fiction, or in the later book to cheap theatre and B-grade movies.

In his imaginative writing, Paterson never quite broke clear to follow his own line, and instead veered back to the pre-existing type. He avoided exploring the subtleties of deep feeling. Rather, he preferred to express intensity of shared feeling in words we can all respond to. As we do.

Main novels considered in this article

A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson

An Outback Marriage

Viking, $24.95 hb, 258 pp, 97806670073610

A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson

The Shearer’s Colt

Viking, $24.95 hb, 232 pp, 9780670073603