Few wrote with such passion for the sport of racing as 'Banjo' Paterson. From an early career as a jumps jockey, Paterson became perhaps Australia's greatest writer on racing and its characters.
One of his earliest efforts was the poem A Dream Of The Melbourne Cup (1886) whilst other poems included Only A Jockey (1887) Tommy Corrigan (1894) and In The Stable (1902).
Paterson's prose included The Shearer's Colt, a novel about racing published in 1936 while perhaps his most famous work The Man From Snowy River (1890) was later made into a highly successful motion picture.
Paterson also served as a correspondent (on horseback) during the Boer War and later became Editor of The Sportsman.
The Oxford Companion To Australian Literature perhaps best summed up Paterson when it called him "the supreme balladist of the horse".
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