A twist on a classic: Clancy of the Overflow by Jackie French

Banjo Paterson’s poem Clancy of the Overflow has captivated esteemed Aussie author Jackie French for decades. Now, she dubs her novel of the same name a tribute to Australia in a story told in the lives of the women Clancy loved.

Clancy of the Overflow, by Jackie French, published by HarperCollins, is out now.

I fell in love with Clancy of the Overflow when I was 10 years old. It took me another 25 years to find my real one.

As Bryan walked up the stones of my front steps 34 years ago, the birds hopped around him. The next morning, we woke to find that the wombat who lived behind my bathroom had left his own greeting — in the form of a dropping on Bryan’s boots outside the front door.

I had at last met a man for whom “the bush had friends to meet him”. He never really left.

My novel Clancy of the Overflow is a love story to our nation. Its history is told in the lives of the women Clancy loved, beginning with the aristocratic Flora who, like so many English women, found herself in a land she could only see as alien and ugly.

Then there is the unexpected romance of Clancy’s beloved sister, Maria – a woman who is disfigured, hidden as a monster by her father, yet acclaimed as a scientist in England for the articles and collections she publishes under a male name. She at last finds joy with a man who sees her true beauty.

Clancy’s last love is for Rose, “the drover’s boy” for whom he gives up everything. Yet his marriage to her brings him more than he could ever dream: a son, a beloved granddaughter, “Nancy of the Overflow”, and the family she acquires, including Jed Kelly and the indomitable Scarlett, who conquers life from a wheelchair.

Even though this is a book about a man, it is made up of women’s stories – the ones left out of the history books. The history I learned at school was mostly about dead white blokes in cities. The stories Great Grandma and my grandmothers told me were the ones their own grandmothers and great-grandmothers had passed on to them.

“Tell us another story about when you were a little girl, Grandma!” we’d say, and she would regale us again about dancing with a bushranger, or the lost child rescued by a yowie.

Clancy of the Overflow by Jackie French

Jannie (Jean McPherson) revealed the secrets behind Banjo Paterson’s poem Waltzing Matilda, and how the women who had no vote collected tens of thousands of signatures for the referendum on Federation, by waiting outside the pubs till the blokes were too drunk to know what they were signing.

Their stories were endlessly fascinating, told while Grandma made her apple tea cake, stuffed shoulder of lamb, or the best scones in the world (not made with lemonade, but ready to serve by the time the kettle had boiled). Years later, in searing droughts, when it was too hot to work outside, other women told me their stories – of droving at the turn of the 19th century, when you had to take the cattle to Queensland to find grass and water (“Clancy’s gone to Queensland drovin’ and we don’t know where he are”).

My life has been so very full of women who told me stories, and shared the knowledge of their lives.

Jean, Mary and Neeta taught me that no shearer’s smoke is complete without at least two kinds of cake, as well as mutton and pickle, cheese and tomato, curried egg sandwiches and choc chip buscuits,

They taught me how to tan a rabbit skin, shear a sheep, spin the wool and knit a pair of socks; keep my kitchen table legs in a tin of water so the ants can’t get into the bread and jam; store butter in a campy oven, or in an oven made from an ant’s nest if there is one handy. We also sang the old tunes of the men and women who’ve taken their stock “on the long paddock” — along the roads to eat the grass on the verges, camping a few days wherever they could find enough water.

That is the problem with the poem I love so much.

We have Clancy of the Overflow, but where is Nancy? because she was there, whether disguised in men’s clothes as “the drover’s boy”, or managing a property and caring for the kids while her man was off shearing.

Look for the women of the bush and you’ll find them — in Henry Lawson’s stories of Water Them Geraniums (the one luxury of a woman housekeeping in the dust) or his tragic poem of a young wife who has lost her child beneath a pool of waterlilies.

Sometimes it is as though I can hear the voices of the past calling. “remember me” as the old tales and old knowledge of our country is lost.

Clancy of the Overflow is as rich in stories as a Christmas cake has sultanas. The book deals with at least 10 kinds of love, floods, droughts, laughter, eccentricity, babies born and weddings, the dramas and melodramas of life from the beginning of the story in the 1860s until its end in 1989.

But most of all it holds my heart; my love of country and for the men and women who - thinly disguised at times — are the bedrock of Clancy of the Overflow.

Another beautiful Australian read inspired by the past is Vanessa McCausland’s The Lost Summers Of Driftwood, our Sunday Book Club book of the month for January. You can get it for 30 per cent off by using the code DRIFTWOOD at Booktopia. And don’t forget to share your favourite holiday reads with fellow book lovers by joining the chat at the Sunday Book Club Facebook page.