I must, yet again, correct
myself, this time re the below. Of course ‘the Overflow’ must
be by the Lachlan. I was distracted by shallow surmising by webfillers
who deal only in words that have been electronically recorded.
AB Paterson was born near Molong
in 1864 and lived for 6 years at the family property near Obley (east of Peak
Hill and Goobang NP), then lived until the age of 10 at ‘Illalong’,
just up the road from here near Binalong. (He returned there for holidays
and his descriptions of the local bird life remain of interest.) He was
educated in Sydney, becoming a practising solicitor there in 1886, and
published ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ – in The Bulletin - in
1889.
He sends the letter TO Clancy
‘where I met him down the Lachlan years ago’, when Clancy was shearing,
SO he addresses it just ‘on spec’ to ‘Clancy of the
Overflow’. The name so coined is the one AB later uses for Clancy
in ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and the reference to ‘the
Overflow’ must be read accordingly. We do not know exactly what ‘the
Overflow’ was but presumably it was in that (then) seasonally swampy part
of the Lachlan between Forbes and its confluence with the Murrumbidgee.
Perhaps it was a property, perhaps a locality, perhaps both. It might
have been a distributary of the Lachlan, perhaps even Willandra Billabong itself,
which is the major one. That raises the interesting possibility that
Clancy might have been shearing at Big Willandra with Black Jack from
Gundagai. Perhaps they were shearing mates, although the song suggests Black
Jack might have managed a slightly more polished communication than ‘Clancy’s
gone to Queensland droving and we don’t know where he are’.
Or perhaps he was Black from dipping his thumbnail in tar.
From: Geoffrey Dabb [
Sent: Tuesday, 16 February 2010 4:03 PM
To:
Subject: [canberrabirds] Reedy to go
There is a line in The Man from Snowy River:
‘where around the Overflow the reedbeds sweep and sway to the
breezes ...’ I have sometimes wondered whether Banjo
Paterson’s image was of Typha or Phragmites. It would help to know
where ‘the Overflow’ was. Some say it was (at least in Clancy
of the Overflow) a property in western NSW, perhaps on the Macquarie, others
that it was a frequently dry lake in the Bogan system near Nyngan.
Both kinds of stuff occur in the general area, but according to Mr
Cunningham it is Phragmites australis that forms extensive ‘almost
impenetrable’ communities in low-lying areas of the Macquarie and the
Lachlan-Murrumbidgee. Furthermore it is a characteristic of reed
that it ‘sweeps and sways’ and the image does not fit a camp of
stockmen telling yarns against a background of moonlit clumps of erect and
rigid cumbungi.
