THE Man from Snowy River, written 123 years ago by bush bard Banjo Paterson, has a touch of everything typically Australian.
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The poem embodies our character and tells us something about ourselves, our heritage, a country of battlers and supporters of the underdog.
And perhaps it was the “tough and wiry” rider on the “small and weedy beast” that helped capture our imagination.
His courage, horsemanship and never-say-die attitude as he raced down the mountainside “while the others stopped and watched in very fear” could well have been central to our development as a nation. Achievement against the odds.
But with Orange celebrating Banjo Paterson’s 150th birthday next year, it’s worth wondering just who was The Man from Snowy River?
Paterson, born at Narrambla, just out of Orange, on February 17, 1864, went to Corryong in 1889 and stayed with Walter Mitchell at Bringenbrong Station who took him to Tom Groggin Station to meet head musterer Jack Riley.
Riley told Paterson how as a young man he’d chased wild mobs of brumbies when good stockhorses got caught up with them and that’s the basis of the story of the colt from Old Regret in The Man from Snowy River.
Riley also told Paterson how he and others had to ride hard down terrible descents to get the horses back.
Paterson then wrote The Man from Snowy River and it was published in The Bulletin on April 26, 1890.
A string of riders have claimed to be The Man, (and Anthony Mundine wasn’t one of them) including Jack Riley, Jack Clark from Adaminaby, Owen Cummings from the Northern Territory, Jim Troy from Queensland, Bill Spencer from Tumut and George Hedger from the Monaro region.
Jack Riley is probably the closest to Paterson's character who “bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye...”
Riley, who died in 1914, is buried at Corryong and The Man from Snowy River is engraved on his headstone.
But Sydney man Richard Whalan believes his great-grandfather George Hedger was the original man from Snowy River.
He has copies of a letter written to his father by author Frank Clune and a Sydney newspaper report in 1912 about George Hedger’s death which referred to him as “the man from Snowy River”.
So we’ll probably never ever know who he really was.
Maybe efforts could be made to come up with an answer for the 150th celebrations.
Mind in the gutter
Orange still has lots of those historic bluestone kerbs, particularly around the central business district.
They look great and are a visible sign of the past when all the city’s kerbs were made from bluestone before most were replaced with concrete.
But car owners aren’t all that fussed about them because in some streets the kerbs are so high they’re taking a huge toll on exhaust pipe tips when drivers go back too far while parking.
They’re greeted with an ominous grinding sound as the chrome tips scrape the tough bluestone, coming off second best.
But then we don’t want to lose the heritage kerbs, do we?
We just have to be more careful parking.
Water torture
A woman tells her husband there’s trouble with the car. It has water in the carburettor.
“Water in the carburettor. That’s ridiculous,” says the husband.
“I tell you the car has water in the carburettor.”
“You don’t even know what a carburettor is”, says the husband. “Anyway, where’s the car?”
Wife: “It’s in the swimming pool.”
A movie experience
A poll has found ET the extra-terrestrial is the best-loved childhood movie.
According to the poll, Steven Spielberg, who directed and co-produced the 1982 classic, is also the favourite director.
ET won four Oscars, best sound, best score, best sound effects and best visual effects and was nominated for best picture but lost to Gandhi.
Bambi (1942), The Goonies (1985), The Lion King (1994) and Toy Story (1995) were the next four favourites.
The poll commissioned by Samsung found the line ”Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” from the 1939 epic Gone with the Wind was the best film quote.
“Go ahead, make my day” from Dirty Harry, “Nobody puts baby in a corner” from Dirty Dancing, “I'll be back” from The Terminator and “Life is like a box of chocolates ”from Forrest Gump were next.
Relaxation and escapism was the reason 72 per cent of people watched movies on average two to four times a month.
Alley is as bad as it’s painted
The alley off Summer Street between Kathmandu and Dick Smith is a shocker.
It’s dark, dirty and the bare concrete wall is covered with graffiti, obviously not a candidate for tidy towns.
And it’s not a good look for visitors who use it.
Usually where graffiti vandals are involved, if the wall is cleaned they’ll be back again the next day to attack it. In fact they no doubt hang out in this local underbelly at night.
It’s time to do something and the best deterrent is better lighting and some police action but that’s not likely so if you can’t beat ‘em, as they say, join ‘em.
We could recruit several graffiti artists to paint murals on the wall because when that happens other taggers usually leave things alone.
The murals could be changed every few months if need be and then we’d have a sort of revolving art show.
It mightn’t work but it’s worth a try because anything would be better than what’s there now.
![BLAST FROM THE PAST: Our bluestone kerbs. BLAST FROM THE PAST: Our bluestone kerbs.](/images/transform/v1/resize/frm/storypad-grdM53xTdP35kwU4wuk5NW/78d77ee1-9cbf-4ae2-ac50-85e13b7a32bb.jpg/w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)