Looking for Rose Paterson: How Family Bush Life Nurtured Banjo the Poet.

Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2017. Paperback large wide octavo, very good plus condition, thick card covers (with wide flaps), black & white text-photos, colour photos (most full-page), sepia (brown-tinted) photos, minor edgewear, faint sticker mark rear cover. Heavy (1.0 Kg), and extra postage may be requested to destinations outside Australia. 200 pp. This book by Jennifer Gall contains the candid letters that Rose Paterson wrote to her younger sister Nora Murray-Prior. Rose was to mother of famous port Banjo Paterson. The odd, the unexpected, the humorous, the tragic and the shocking are all part of her story. Rose spent the best part of her life at Illalong, an isolated sheep station in western New South Wales, where she brought up seven children in tough circumstances. Rose lived in a rustic world of late 19th-century pioneers, where women endured continuous cycles of pregnancy, childbirth and recovery, and the constraints of strict social codes. Her first child, Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson, was to gain fame as one of Australia's most popular poets. Rose's letters, rescued from oblivion by Banjo's biographer, reveal a woman devoted to her family, with strong powers of observation. This fascinating book tells Rose Paterson's story, and within the rhythm of her life, the bush childhood of Banjo Paterson. The author is a curator of the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra.