A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson (1864–1941) is probably the best-known and least-liked poet in Australia. His bush ballads, as they are called, still get inflicted on Australian school students, who typically meet these with youthful disinterest or with political suspicion – both are fair. Paterson was a lyrical mythologiser of rural Australia. The speakers of his poems are often someone who loves the bush and has a certain degree of experience in it but remains trapped in a boring urban life; these poems might be addressed or dedicated to a former coworker, a local legend, or some other gorgeous bounding alpha-male who is still out there at the rural frontier, either dead or alive. Banjo had grown up in the country, as part of an affluent farming family: first they lived on a station inland, near Yeoval (town motto: ‘STILL THE GREATEST’; town population: 330), then they relocated to his uncle’s old farm near a town named Yass. He moved to Sydney for high school, trained as a lawyer, then worked as a journalist under the pseudonym Banjo, which he borrowed from a horse his father liked. While his journalism was popular enough, his poetry became a sensation at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This was a period marked by urbanisation, modernisation, and the rise of (post)colonial Australian nationalism. The Australian colonies federated to a more or less independent state in 1901.

Both implicitly and explicitly, Paterson’s poetry fed the imagination of a settler Australia that would insist on its distance from Britain – and solidify its emotional claims to the country – by focusing on mythologies about the bush, and particularly about rural forms of settler life that were already dying out by the time Paterson got to them. In this sense, they have not aged well. They feature white men, and occasionally women, doing hardy-looking things on unceded Aboriginal land, while showing limited interest in (or respect for) First Nations people. They celebrate ingenuity and mateship while remaining silent about dispossession. They are written in goofy, rhyming, anapestic lines. Among progressive young Australians, Paterson typically only seems interesting as an instance of the sort of white bread hegemonic Anglo-Australian nonsense that everyone is trying to get past, especially now that the national literary mainstream has begun to celebrate authors with First Nations or migration backgrounds.

I, too, eschewed the work of Paterson – until I left Australia as an adult, eventually settling in Berlin, where I have lived for the last seven years. At times I found myself hesitantly returning to his poems; when I made my first trip to visit my family in Sydney, I found my grandfather’s old Collected Poems and got reading. There was something in it that called me, and not just because of my growing interest in the mythologies of Australian nationhood, these seeming considerably more fascinating from afar. (I ended up writing a book on Australian identity and Australian birds.) No, there was something in the poetry itself, something that I was unable to simply dismiss as nostalgic white-nationalist kitsch-mongering, something bittersweet and strange that seemed to rumble away beneath the surface of the text. There was an insecurity in the language, a sense of longing and loss; the conventional ballad form seemed far more openly strained than I remembered in its efforts to contain and transmit the wit, the otherness, and the anarchy of settler Australia’s frontier characters. The frontier, after all, was not just a place where Britons became British Australians, learning lessons in resourcefulness and irreverence and hardiness and mateship. It was a place where prior categories – prior language – encountered foreign landscapes, new social arrangements, and the many other languages that existed out there, those of non-anglophone working migrants as well as those of First Nations people. Settlers’ frontier stories ultimately evince only a limited appetite for the strangeness that intrigues them. I set out to mirror this superficiality, and these habits of self-projection and self-imposition, with a method that surfaces oddness on the side of the speaker through collision with a not-quite-real version of other languages. There is a mania to all these stories, a neuroticism about postcolonial identity, to which I – five or more generations white settler – am obviously not immune. And it combines with a nostalgia, an insecurity of identity, that reflects the total Pyrrhic victory of a colonial selfhood that celebrates its frontier encounter with strange nature and new people while laying waste to both, and that then lays waste to that very frontier culture by abandoning rural areas to remorseless neoliberal social Darwinism. The Australian author Nam Le expresses it thus:

Settler Australians, of course, had reasons to be anxious. Their public dreaming was its own strain of prairie madness–cum-colonial nightmare – haunted by irretrievable Albion, revanchist first peoples, an unforgiving land. They were not invited and they were never welcomed. The bush became their giant imago of fear and guilt. Always there, just on the other side of the sill, just beyond the last European syllable – a vast gap of darkness.^[1]

Paterson’s poems are dedicated to a frontier world that has already been lost to him in the city; they may even be lost to everyone as well. When I re-read them as an emigrant from Australia, I found myself moved by the longing, mourning, and insecurity that suddenly seemed integral to his work. The cause of early Australian nationalism was served by tamed, reported encounters with strangeness. In these poems, I could sense the speaker encountering more strangeness than they could handle – or sometimes desiring more strangeness than they could handle – before returning to the anticlimactic solitude of the conquistador, the victor, the purveyor of maps on which the sun would never set. Nostalgia and mythmaking are themes, not just projects, of Paterson’s writing. His oeuvre is run through with memories that blur into confusion, old friends that cannot be reached, birds flying west while a cityslicker watches on and dreams about his old days out there. Rollicking yarns are framed as hearsay. Letters get sent but don’t arrive, or show up in such bad shape that nobody knows what to do with them. I started to think of this as a poetics of non-arrival, each poem a letter sent hopefully towards those parts of the map that have either disappeared or been made entirely unstrange – in both cases a catastrophe. Reading Paterson’s poetry askance, I found it full of clues towards the sorts of things he stands accused of covering up about the Australian frontier: masculine codes of violence, linguistic insecurity, queerness, plurality, and the land’s own resistance to Anglo-Australian ways of using it. Do his poems miss their mark? Of course. I started to appreciate the missing.

I thought I wanted to write critically about Paterson’s poetry, but after several weeks of fumbling, I realised that what I actually wanted to do was write with him – or against him, or around him, or underneath him. I could not quite muster the confidence to claim these subterranean rumblings as part of the poems themselves. What I had, instead, was a certain lyrical enthusiasm: a desire to join in, and to do so in ways that were immensely disloyal but involved no adding of anything not already there. So I tried some experiments. I rearranged lines of poems; I collaged different ones together. I wanted to upturn Paterson’s earth, to break his voice, to give the strangeness a boost in its struggle with his form. Eventually, I settled on a method of autotranslation. Using Google Translate, I put each poem through a series of translations in and out of various languages spoken in Australia – Greek, Arabic, Vietnamese, Polish (no First Nations languages are on the autotranslation sites, and I would not have liked the politics of deploying them so playfully) – as well as back into English, periodically saving versions then starting again with a new sequence of languages. This left me with a set of ten to twenty versions of the poem, some with relatively more grammatical transformation and some with more semantic transformation. (I thought of this process as frottage, as in the surrealist paintings of Max Ernst, whereby rubbing would imbue an artwork with strange, partly random, more or less erotic effects through the imposition of outside textures.) From these versions, I selected lines and sections that I then sutured into one monstrous body, one Frankenstein’s bush ballad, electrified by a new sense of rhythm that still favoured the anapest but ended up far more stuttering, fragmented, and disorientedly intimate than the originals. Because I wanted to emphasise the grammatical breaks, I arranged these new poems in paired lines; I liked when the autotranslation shifted a version’s order and thus caused repetition when arranging the parts. I added the occasional conjunction and tweaked some pronouns. Otherwise, however, everything came from inside the poems themselves – the elements transformed, rearranged, the poem’s tongues forced to slip, their quiet parts loud, if not entirely comprehensible.

The autotranslation method felt particularly motivated in the context of settler colonialism. The frontier mythologies that animate Paterson’s poetry were centered on encounters with the strange that ultimately limit, tame, and falsify the strangeness in question. Like Google Translate’s attempts to render lyric poetry in a foreign language, those mythologies offer up a phoney phantom Other and an utterly ersatz universalism. The Paterson oeuvre ultimately reveals little about the environments, the frontier workers, or the Indigenous cultures of interior Australia – yet it does reveal much about settler literary culture and its insecurities. Middle-class White Australians reach out towards the inland, now as in Paterson’s day, not in order to have their ingoing hypotheses challenged but to play out familiar dreams, nightmares, and other nation-building narratives prepared in advance. Part of what moved me in Paterson’s work was the way these frontier encounters felt tautological, haunted by the solitude of the conquerer and undermined – for all their bounding vigour – by the sense that the settlers had already fought and won, and that in doing so they had destroyed whatever might make life on this continent special. Autotranslation felt, to me, like a way to reflect the tautological nature of this imaginary (Google Translate, after all, offers no genuine sense of the Indonesian, Greek, or Croatian languages). Under this method, Paterson’s poems all get twisted, deconstructed, reassembled, and estranged; still they fail in their hopes of reaching anything outside themselves. I also liked the idea that autotranslation could surface qualities of the colonial project (eroticism, violence, self-absorption, boredom) that were otherwise latent in such canonical texts. Why shouldn’t the colonist be the strange one? It’s all there in the text, anyway – to see it, one only needs to overflow the earth, make cracks in battlegrounds, forget the names, or crush the fruit. Many important poets and thinkers have been critiquing Australian settler colonialism from outside it in recent years. What I could offer here, being a settler myself, was a project of implosion (or self-exposure) from the inside.

The first is a version of perhaps his best known poem, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’, which is spoken by a city office worker fondly remembering a former fellow bushman named Clancy. The speaker tried to write him a letter but got a reply from Clancy’s shearing mate explaining that he’s ‘gone droving’ and ‘we don’t know where he are’. The speaker has ‘wild erratic’ visions of Clancy out there in the bush, and he starts to wish that they could trade places, but must ultimately accept that Clancy’s place is out there while his is among the ‘pallid faces’ and ‘fiendish rattle’ of the city. In the autotranslation, I was struck by certain sections that turned erotic, strange, and dark – here the encounter with Clancy has provoked a genuine overflow, an upturning, one that the narrator cannot neatly compartmentalise and package for general consumption.

OVERFLOW EARTH (after ‘Clancy of the Overflow’)

Having written a letter, and wanting
to know: it was sent where we’d told

ourselves stories. O with Clancy I was
captured – a cut nail in tar. I was over-

flowed earth I was unearthly visions.
When the water span slowly, the arrow

broke slowly. Clancy he rode on behind.
We heard voices of breeze, which I

met on the breeze – there were river-
bed sounds that I met on the river. And

That night was the glory of a century
of stars. We returned to an enemy’s story

of life, to the city’s dark sunlight that
shines between homes, to the scorched

air that spreads through the window to
everyone.  Can you hear the trams rage,

Clancy, hear the mute bells? Hear the
boys speaking language they don’t

understand? Still our form will not cease.
Let them gather in violence. We will haunt

wild and weak with unstoppable
rhythms. And if flood comes I’ll turn back

the seasons, to Clancy. Imagining
how I will change.

The next poem follows Paterson’s epic ballad – later a film – ‘The Man From Snowy River’, a heroic bounding ditty about an underestimated man who catches a special runaway horse. In one version of the autotranslation, that horse bolted from the text as well, shifting the sense of the chase scene. I followed this lead; it felt important. I also responded to the original poem’s rhythms, pushing the chatty ballad form towards – not staccato fragmentation – but a sort of lurching, swinging counter-rhythm. The fact that Australia’s famous Mount Kosciuszko (pronounced cozzie oskoe) was given its accent and thus transformed back into the Polish military hero Tadeusz Kościuszko, a man who never saw Australia and whose name only graces the mountain because a Polish explorer thought it reminded him of an artificial monument in Warsaw, felt appropriate. So too did the many tautologies and repetitions that crept into the poem.

MOUNTAIN OF MOUNTAIN (after ‘The Man From Snowy River’)

There were movements, there were
old regrets. Our fall was our escape.

All those jumps in the war, all those
thousands of pounds, all those cracks

that had formed in the battleground.
Everyone searched in the forest of

horses. Everyone searched in the farms
overnight. I was one little man

like an animal weed. Bloodless and
beaten and sad like a choir. But

then you tough and tired but
then you going on – in impatience

we quick-wore the signs of the game.
We sent flint stones to fly and

we cleared fallen wood – still the
man from my dream has not come.

On through wetlands and trees,
over fall-apart ground, in the rhythm

of rhythm we went till we fell to
the safe-and-sound bottom, to the

terrible instant – still the man from
my dream has not come. Look: I

have never had courage, I have never
burned brave, I have never known

mountain of mountain before. O
Kościuszko we’ll go where the pine

ridges rise. We’ll wash stars in cold
air,  we’ll wash tears in white air,

we’ll read breeze in the breeze until
crystal has come. All the men of

the wrath – they are breeding today.
They will soon tell our story of home.

These poems – and a few more – I shelved for four years. When I returned to them, I found myself pleased with their strangeness but also desiring of a little more coherence. I also liked the idea of my influence becoming more obvious. In the coming three poems, I followed the same method of autotranslation and assembly, but in doing so gave myself the freedom to replace individual words with synonyms. I translated, I assembled, I reworked, I translated, I assembled, I reworked. When I reworked, I left months between revisions, hoping to estrange my own creation; I thought of this, too, as autotranslation, auto- as in self as well as automated. The resulting poems are shorter, and easier to follow. They are perhaps more explicitly disloyal to Paterson, as is the case here. ‘A Bush Christening’ is one of his famous comic poems. At its centre is a foolish country boy who does not want to be christened because he thinks it involves being branded like a horse. Here the autotranslation immediately lost the joke – which I liked. It also surfaced, in some of the versions, a dynamic of (masculine) insiderdom and outsiderdom that always felt central to Paterson’s project. By what ceremony does one become an authentic bush bloke, the kind thus immortalised? On which side is the chaos and on which side the order? And where does the speaker stand? My process generated a certain instability, here, and a kind of nonsense that I felt well suited to the project of (re)naming and (re)narrating on Australian land. But I also chose to keep the broad narrative arc of this poem, perhaps more explicitly than in the two prior experiments.

         BE NAMED (after ‘A Bush Christening’)

Outside the church, on the roads of the lost,
is a young man who’s strong and who’s clean

but can’t stop. He has never been baptised, he
does not know the names, if he ever meets

death he will not have known rock. Then his
fortune arrives, yes the preacher arrives, it’s

the man who was written to make him a man.
Now his face growing white. Now his listening

fear. He has seen them beat foals he was one
of those foals it had seemed to him all very small

understand: If a man of the flock makes you
one of the flock, then a man must be dressed

in the ways of the flock. If it has to mean some-
thing then make it a sign. So he runs to the

bush. So his tears shining eyelids. Like a
mongrel he runs from his father and tongue.

O come out and be named, for the devil, for christ.
Presentation he says; and the parents in vain.

Now the words of the preacher: give bolt to
the bull you must strike him indifferent I have

water I’ll name him if he comes I name name him
from shame. So he lays on the carpet. So

they punish him freely. Then he gets up
to run then he’s shot in the head then the

preacher runs too runs for justice and peace
runs from all of the things that he hates

more than sin.

As time went on, I found myself wanting to accept and draw out distortions in the poems’ I-thou relationship. That I-thou, after all, is where Paterson’s nation-building content resides: the creation of a national feeling in these poems required an intimate bond between the bush-knowing folk poet and the intended collective of (white) Australian readers, unified all by their shared familiarity with frontier mythologies. The instability of these new poems seemed to mirror an unclarity about the identity or aims of the speaker, an effect I liked. This is clearest in the following poem, a transformation of Paterson’s patriotic 1915 ‘We’re All Australians Now’. During World War One, Australia sent forces to join those of Great Britain; Anglo-Australian nationalists like Paterson cheered the loss of Australian life on farflung shores as a moment of collective pride. Having shown such martial courage, their argument went, Australia was now a true nation like any other. This view remains influential today. WWI memorialisation has become a cornerstone of Australian nationhood, particularly among conservatives, who do not seem bothered that their insistence on inherited family stories of service in Gallipoli and the Somme come at the exclusion of those Australians whose families arrived after 1918. Indeed, when Paterson booms that we are all Australians now thanks to the sacrifice of our soldiers abroad, he lists backgrounds drawn exclusively from the British Isles. This is the poem that I changed least, since a certain racist-martial subtext was already close to the surface. Primarily I wanted the autotranslation to find a new tone, one more wounded – and disoriented – in its mythological ambitions.

WE ALREADY KNOW (After ‘We’re All Australians Now’ )

Seizing the pen. Australian lines.
Every Australian son born at home.

There is an ancient nation that is dying
no more. All of us Australians

now. And we are half afraid of wind, and
we already know the sea. A race that

shows courage is measured in steel.
And we have knowledge of things that

a nation knows – feels. A tomb
below the river. A peak on Kabatepe.

We’ve got brave men and conflicts and
history and boys. O yes disappear

difference, like weeds under plough.
English, Scottish, Irish breeds. Now

we drink to our team: to Australian
spirits! Australian cars! the Australian

flag! And now you keep on fighting
while I make you home.

My final poem returns to an earlier Paterson work. ‘In Defence of the Bush’ was published in 1892 as part of an odd public tussle between Paterson and his fellow poet/journalist Henry Lawson, who had written mockingly of the romantic rural portraits made by deluded city bushmen. Paterson’s ad hominem rebuke addressed Lawson directly, accusing him of snobbery and of having missed all the real rough wonders of Australian rural life on his brief and condescending tour. Autotranslation wreaked havoc on the nature of the address, here, bringing the I closer to the thou and thus surfacing an insecurity about the speaker’s own relationship to the bush (and his similarity to Lawson). After all, yearning romanticisation and snippy condemnation both reflect a lack of real intimacy. This lack of intimacy with Australian bush is a constant settler nightmare, one exacerbated by the drastic environmental degradation that has accompanied colonial and postcolonial settlement. Throughout, I have been struck by the estrangement that comes from tweaks in terminology for the natural world: forest for bush, dirt for dust, wetlands, peaks, and so on. Here, too, Australian nature appears as alien – or might it be the speaker who is alien?

WALDSCHUTZ (after ‘In Defence of the Bush’)

And the mad bull was calling
when you first appeared. And

with bitter resentment you cursed
what you saw: all the roads

hot and dusty, the plains scorched
and brown, the fruit that gets

crushed by the drunkards in cities.
One day you’ll wonder what all

of this means – what it meant. You
continue this path that you’ve taken.

Now the sunlit earth pants. There
are creatures in pain. Can you hear

choirs singing? Can you make this
a garden? You were much better off

in the state you were in. And you will
never like bush. You will never like

bush. You

^[1] Nam Le, On David Malouf (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2019), ebook.