A. B. `Banjo` PatersonPrint Page

The cairn commemorates the poet, A. B. `Banjo` Paterson.   The plaque is missing from this cairn.

Best known as a poet, writer and journalist, he was also a lawyer, a war correspondent and farmer, as well as having fought in World War One.  Paterson's more notable poems include "Waltzing Matilda", "The Man from Snowy River" and "Clancy of the Overflow". He took the nickname "Banjo" in his late twenties, from the name of a horse his father once owned. A. B. "Banjo" Paterson was born in 1864 at Narrambla near Orange in New South Wales., which was the home of Mrs Rose Templer, his mother’s aunt, but in fact he spent the first 7 years of his life on a property now known as "Buckinbah" in Yeoval.

Children from a small village in Scotland have joined forces with the NSW town of Yeoval to honour Banjo Paterson, the man who wrote Waltzing Matilda. Rocks collected by pupils from Carmichael Primary School in South Lanarkshire are being shipped to Australia to help build a cairn to commemorate the legendary poet.

Banjo's parents emigrated from Carmichael to Australia in 1850 and he was born and raised on the family's Buckinbah Farm, near Yeoval. In 1895, at the age of 31, he wrote Waltzing Matilda, setting it to music based on the Scottish song Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea.

The idea for the cairn came from Alf Cantrell of the Yeoval Historical Society, which has made the town a destination for Banjo fans. A museum has been created and there is now an annual festival in his memory. Mr Cantrell said: "Banjo was a great Australian, a great man and he had a connection with Yeoval and Scotland so it seemed a good idea to build a cairn.

"Children here collected stones from the Buckinbah farm last week and on the same day the children in Scotland collected their stones." The cairn, an ancient Scottish tradition for marking burial sites, will be built using both sets of stones.
Sydney Morning Herald, 10 February 2008. 

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