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The "Bush Controversy"

In 1892, Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, his friend and co-contributor to The Bulletin, decided to have a little fun, and to stir up a controversy in their poems. Henry Lawson set out to criticise the optimistic picture The Banjo painted of the Bush, and The Banjo in turn railed against the doom and gloom of Lawson's outlook.

Other poets became willing participants in this poetic altercation, and their poems are represented here.

9 July 1892 Henry Lawson Borderland
(Later re-titled "Up the country")
23 July 1892 Banjo Paterson In Defence of the Bush
30 July 1892 Edward Dyson The Fact of the Matter
6 August 1892 Henry Lawson In Answer to "Banjo", and otherwise
(Later: The City Bushman)
20 August 1892 H.H.C.C. The Overflow of Clancy
27 August 1892 Francis Kenna Banjo of the Overflow
1 October 1892 Banjo Paterson In Answer to Various Bards
(Later: An Answer to Various Bards)
8 October 1892 Henry Lawson The Poets of the Tomb

20 October 1894 Banjo Paterson A Voice from the Town

(Listing from information developed by Alice Holtin,
a Paterson afficionada from Arkansas)

Paterson described the "Bulletin battle" in these words:

Henry Lawson was a man of remarkable insight in some things and of extraordinary simplicity in others. We were both looking for the same reef, if you get what I mean; but I had done my prospecting on horseback with my meals cooked for me, while Lawson has done his prospecting on foot and had had to cook for himself. Nobody realized this better than Lawson; and one day he suggested that we should write against each other, he putting the bush from his point of view, and I putting it from mine.

"We ought to do pretty well out of it," he said, "we ought to be able to get in three or four sets of verses before they stop us."

This suited me all right, for we were working on space, and the pay was very small . . . so we slam-banged away at each other for weeks and weeks; not until they stopped us, but until we ran out of material . . .

"Banjo Paterson Tells His Own Story",
Sydney Morning Herald, 4 Feb-4 Mar 1939