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Clancy of The Overflow
Clancy of The Overflow
"Banjo" Paterson
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.
And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.
The poem is written from the point of view of a city-dweller who once met the title
character, a shearer and drover, and now envies the imagined pleasures of Clancy's lifestyle,
which he compares favourably to life in "the dusty, dirty city" and "the round eternal of the
cashbook and the journal".
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.
The title comes from the address of a letter the city-dweller sends, "The Overflow" being the
name of the sheep station where Clancy was working when they met.
The poem is based on a true story that was experienced by Banjo Paterson. He was working
as a lawyer when someone asked him to send a letter to a man named Thomas Gerald
Clancy, asking for a payment that was never received. Banjo sent the letter to "The
Overflow" and soon received a reply that read:
The letter looked as though it had been written with a thumbnail dipped in tar and it is from
this that Banjo Paterson found the inspiration for the poem, along with the meter.
Thomas Gerald Clancy wrote a poem to reply to Banjo Paterson's, named "Clancy's Reply".
Clancy himself makes a brief appearance in another popular Banjo Paterson poem, "The
Man from Snowy River", which was first published the following year.