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Reading Clancy of the Overflow
Banjo Paterson wrote "Clancy of the Overflow" in 1889, and it has been read in Australian classrooms ever since. It sets two lives against each other — the drover out on the Lachlan and the clerk stuck in a city office — and lets the contrast do the argument.
Read the opening stanza below before watching the reading.
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of betterKnowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,Just "on spec", addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow".A. B. 'Banjo' Paterson, 'Clancy of the Overflow', 1889
Hear it read aloud
A reading of the opening stanzas.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/REPLACE_ME
Transcript available on the online version.
Notice how much of the poem's music comes from internal rhyme — "letter"/"better", "knew him"/"to him" — rhymes landing inside the line rather than only at the end of it. Read the stanza aloud twice: once flat, once leaning into those internal rhymes. The second reading is closer to how the ballad was meant to travel.
Write four lines about a place you have only heard about from someone else — somewhere you have never been.
Use at least one internal rhyme. Don't worry about the ending; the point is the sound of the middle of the line.
Paterson published under the pen name "The Banjo", after a station racehorse his family owned. "Clancy of the Overflow" appeared in The Bulletin, which is where most of his early work found its readers.