Banjo Paterson was born at Narambla Station, near Orange, New South Wales, the eldest child of Andrew Bogle Paterson and Rose Isabella (nee Barton). During his childhood he was in constant contact with drovers, bushrangers, teamsters and became familiar with the country recreations and feuds which appear in his work. Many of the experiences of his youth provided material for his later writings.
After concluding his education Paterson gained a position as a clerk in a solicitor's office and was admitted as a solicitor on 28 August, 1886. While still a law student he submitted the poem “El Mahdi to the Australian Troops” to the Bulletin and on 28 February, 1885 it became his first published poem. In 1895 Paterson became famous when his first collection, The Man From Snowy River and Other Verses, was published. Within a week it sold out, and it sold 10,000 copies in its first year. In England his work was compared to that of Rudyard Kipling, who was later to become Paterson's firm friend.
Paterson’s most famous ballads are “Waltzing Matilda” and “The Man from Snowy River”. His reputation matched Henry Lawson’s, though Paterson became more popular and more widely read, perhaps because where Lawson critically scrutinised the bush, Paterson celebrated it along with idealising the bush horseman. In 1892-93 Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, in the Bulletin, debated the bucolic aspects of the Australian bush, where Lawson objected to Paterson’s gilded view of bush life.
Paterson’s “Clancy of the Overflow” is an example of choosing the bush as an imaginative refuge from the city. The city was often characterised as cramped and polluted, in contrast to the wholesome and open bush, where the ‘authentic’ Australia was to be found. “Clancy” was also in part Paterson’s response to the poverty endured by many of the artists and writers, the sort of life which, as Lawson put it, “gives a man a God-Almighty longing to break away and take to the Bush”.
Paterson was a keen amateur sportsman and adventurer, travelling to the Boer War and the Chinese Boxer Rebellion as a war correspondent before returning to Australia to become a lecturer on the Boer War, on which he was now considered an expert. He returned to Australia in 1902 and met and married Alice Emily Walker. At this time he abandoned his legal career to become a professional journalist, and was appointed editor of the Sydney Evening News. He and Alice settled in Sydney for a time before moving to the Yass district where Paterson wrote his rejected treatise Racehorses and Racing and edited the Australian Country Journal.
With the outbreak of World War I Paterson left for England to become a war correspondent, but ended up in the remount division as a lieutenant and then a Major, returning to Australia in 1919. Following the war, Paterson once more became a journalist writing a series of articles for Smith's Weekly, then editing the Sydney Sportsman, while continuing to write radio scripts, fiction and verse.