The Banjo Paterson High Country Trail
Tallangatta
Tallangatta
Do we assume that Paterson rode a horse between Tallangatta and the Upper Murray? There was a well-trodden route between the Upper Murray and the nearest railhead at old Tallangatta. He might have even ridden behind a mob of Upper Murray horses which had been sold to the Army for military use as remounts. Alternatively perhaps he might have taken Tom Berrigan’s coach from Corryong to Tallangatta, or even from Tallangatta to Corryong! What we do know is that Paterson visited both Tallangatta and the Upper Murray and at some time on the Road to Kosciusko Paterson took photographs of a buggy on a dirt road. Was it the road between Tallangatta and Corryong or Corryong and Tallangatta? Or was it the road from Gundagai, Tumut and Tumbarumba?
Photograph from Banjo Paterson's album, (Source: NLA MS10483 The Papers of Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson,10/30/38)
How M’Ginnis went Missing
How M’Ginnis went Missing
Let us cease our idle chatter
Let tears bedew our cheek
For a man from Tallangatta
Has been missing for a week.’
Where the roaring, flooded Murray
Covered all the lower land,
There he started in a hurry,
With a bottle in his hand.
And his fate is hid for ever,
But the public seem to think
That he slumbered by the river,
‘Neath the influence of drink.
And they scarcely seem to wonder
That the river, wide and deep,
Never woke him with its thunder,
Never stirred him in his sleep.
As the crashing logs came sweeping,
And their tumult filled the air,
Then M’Ginnis murmured, sleeping,
“’Tis a wake in ould Kildare.”
So the river rose and found him
Sleeping softly by the stream,
And the cruel waters drowned him
Ere he wakened from his dream.
And the blossom-tufted wattle,
Blooming brightly on the lea
Saw M’Ginnis and the bottle
Going drifting out to sea.
The Bulletin, 1889
If the poem ‘How M’Ginnis went Missing’ was published in 1889, the same year that Paterson published his famous poem ‘The Man from Snowy River'. This suggests that Paterson may have visited Tallangatta and possibly the Upper Murray in the late 1880s.
During the First World War when Paterson arrived at the 2nd Remount Depot in Heliopolis in December 1915, Major General Bridges’ horse Sandy was one of the best-known horses at the Remount Depot. Sandy was looked after at the Depot until March 1916 when he was transferred to Calais in France in the care of Captain Leslie Whitfield. While it is likely that Paterson knew Sandy, we don’t know if Paterson knew that Sandy had come from Tallangatta.
It is likely that there were other horses from Tallangatta, from the Upper Murray and other locations on the Banjo Paterson High Country Trail that passed through the Remount Depot in Heliopolis and afterwards when the Depot moved in March 1916 to Moascar near Ismailia on the banks of the Suez Canal.
Men from the country districts mentioned on the Banjo Paterson High Country Trail would also have drawn horses from the Remount Depot and they were likely to have known Major Paterson, the one time war correspondent and poet who had chosen to serve with them as a Light Horseman. In 1902 Paterson wrote about the horses that were left behind after the Boer War and a verse of his poem ‘The Last Parade’ resonated again after the First World War:
‘Over the sea you brought us,
Over the leagues of foam:
Now we have served you fairly
Will you not take us home?’
Brett Garling’s sculpture of Sandy is a symbol for all the horses that ‘served’ ‘fairly’ and didn’t come home.
Acknowledgements
The Upper Murray Historical Society wishes to acknowledge all of the above organisations for their support and thank the
National Library of Australia (NLA) together with
Mr Alistair Campbell for their assistance and their permission to use images from the
Papers of Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson (MS 10483), NLA. For more information
click here.
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