Banjo Paterson: Bush poet Geoffrey Graham brings legends to life

BANJO Paterson may have died nearly 80 years ago, but when Geoffrey Graham dons suit, hat and makeup, the great Australian bush poet is very much alive.

Way with words: Bush poet Geoffrey Graham will be performing at Corryong. Picture: Andy Rogers

BANJO Paterson may have died almost 80 years ago, but when Geoffrey Graham dons suit, hat and makeup, the great Australian bush poet is very much alive.

“People tell me ‘you look more like Banjo than Banjo’, but then again when I perform as Henry Lawson they say the same thing,” says Geoffrey.

“When I’ve performed Banjo’s The Man from Snowy River I get standing ovations. Partly it’s the words of the poem itself, but as a performer I’m also passionate about it and have a vision in my head.

“Because I’ve ridden in the bush and chased cattle, I have a feeling for it. While I’m performing I see the images in my head. If I don’t see a horse, the audience won’t see a horse.”

For the past three decades Geoffrey has been travelling Australia with his one-man bush poetry performances, including his most popular The Man from Snowy River re-enactment, which will be at The Man from Snowy River Bush Festival in Corryong which runs for four days from next Thursday.

Combining traditional bush poetry with his own self-penned rhyming prose, alongside performance and music, the 67-year-old former farmer and agricultural lecturer has dedicated most of his career to keeping the works of Australia’s most renowned bush poets alive.

Geoffrey even lives on a lifestyle property at Eaglehawk, in central Victoria, the town made famous by Banjo’s poem Mulga Bill’s Bicycle.

“At one stage my wife and I were looking to buy a home in Eaglehawk Rd, Ironbark, and I thought this is getting silly,” he says with a laugh.

Performing at festivals, schools, clubs, agricultural shows and even travelling overseas to perform at Gallipoli and Beersheba, Geoffrey is best known for his show ‘The Man from Ironbark’, a two-hour journey through Banjo’s life.

for CL: Banjo Paterson impersonator and bush poet Geoffrey Graham and will be performing at Corryong's upcoming Victorian Bush Poetry Championships.Picture: ANDY ROGERS

Other shows include A Taste of the Outback; Wool, Sweat and Tears; Bards and Bushrangers; Voices of War: An Anzac Story; CJ Dennis’ The Sentimental Bloke; and Henry’s Alive, a tribute to Lawson.

He has released four CDs and two books of his works.

Given this lifelong dedication, it’s not surprising Geoffrey sees a renewed love of bush poetry around the nation.

“The further north you go the more popular bush poetry is. In some ways it’s a Queensland thing, but it’s also of course a rural thing,” he says.

“When I first performed The Man From Ironbark in Winton in 1995, people were queuing for three hours and a mate said it was like religious fervour in the hall.

“I performed it at a wedding and received a standing ovation, with 19-year-old girls coming up to me after saying they thought they’d be bored but were moved.”

Geoffrey says his performances are driven by both a personal and societal motivation.

Personally, he says the shows are a tribute to his own ancestors.

“There’s 200 years of Australian pioneers in my family,” says Geoffrey, who studied agricultural science and was a lecturer at Yanco Agricultural College before discovering his love of performance and poetry, transferring to drama at the Victorian College of the Arts in the 1980s.

“I grew up on a sheep and cattle farm and we didn’t have TV, so my dad would recite Banjo and my mum would play the piano. I rode a horse to school and was shearing and ploughing by the age of 12,” he says.

“I had 14 of my relatives in World War I, including nurses and five in the Light Horse. I was called up to Vietnam but it was deferred because of university.”

Geoffrey says bush poetry is more important than ever for a modern audience.

“I’m not just about getting up there and ha-ha, providing redback-on-the-toilet-seat entertainment,” he says.

Bush balladeer: Banjo Paterson

“A Year 12 student came up to me once and said what has Henry Lawson got to do with his generation? Lawson talked about poverty, violence, depression, he cast the light on mental health long ago.

“Nothing is new. Teens think they invented love but CJ Dennis was the one to say ‘tart’, which meant ‘sweetheart’.

“While it’s important we don’t forget our history, it’s also important to look forward and to see the courage and compassion of these pioneers, compared to our current leaders.”

Given the modern fascination with technology, Geoffrey finds school students have short attention spans, so “I pull out stockwhips, shears, rabbit traps and bloomers, just so they don’t go to sleep”.

His own bush poetry draws on subjects as varied as technology and Australian rules to TV weather presenter Jane Bunn, even converting it to a rap beat for students.

Geoffrey acknowledges early bush poetry was largely written “about men, by men, for men” and some modern bush poetry can be bawdy.

“There definitely are some bush poets who put stand-up comedy into verse and a lot of people like that. If it’s obvious, slap-in-your-face stuff, that’s not my thing. Each to his own,” he says. “At the same time, people take offence when I talk about asylum seekers from the perspective of an Aboriginal person and that we’re all boat people.”

Geoffrey has studied the lives of the poets themselves in order to portray them as accurately as possible on stage.

Banjo, he says, had a short right arm and so he holds his right arm on stage. Lawson, he imagines, was “erect, yet loose and gangly”.

So after three decades embodying the spirits of these bush poets, does he ever feel a ghostly presence?

“When I first started I didn’t realise I had so many personal connections to Banjo, which are quite uncanny, from our height to our wedding dates,” Geoffrey says.

“It sounds really strange but one time I was performing a show in northern NSW and suddenly my voice changed to that of a piercing old man, the hairs on my neck stood on end and it was quite emotional.

“One of my road crew came up to me and asked what on earth happened. I just said ‘I don’t know, but it wasn’t me’.”

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