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A. B. "Banjo" Paterson, Australia's most popular bush balladist, is associated with "the Bulletin school" of the 1890s, a group of writers recognized for their articulation of a "bush legend," and for the literary construction in a period of emerging nationalism of an Australian identity (or of diverse identities) that reflects national perceptions of the cultural significance of the bush. He is recognized as well by literary historians for his short stories, sketches, and children's writing, and he is also known as a journalist, novelist, and broadcaster.
Born 17 February 1864 at Nyambla, a family property near Orange in central western New South Wales, Andrew Barton Paterson, "Barty," as he was known then, was the eldest of seven children of Scottish-born Andrew Paterson and his Australian wife, Rose, sheep and cattle graziers whose regular station home, Buckinbah, was farther west. In the posthumously published memoir "Illalong Children" (collected in Singer of the Bush, 1983), Paterson nostalgically recalls his childhood experiences at Buckinbah and Illalong (near Yass), incorporating details of bush life that provide important evidence that his verse is not the unalloyed product of a mythmaking urban intelligentsia, the school of "city bushmen," who without experience of bush life set out to employ it for prescribed romantic and nationalistic purposes.
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