Banjo Paterson and a section of the new High Country Trail linking places connected to his life, travels and poetry. Image: Joe Calvert of Calvert Designs.
For years, Jack Riley occupied that blurry space between history and legend.
The stockman and manager who spent decades running cattle at Tom Groggin had long been linked to The Man from Snowy River, but exactly how much of Banjo Paterson’s famous horseman was inspired by Riley has always been harder to pin down.
For Honor Auchinleck, the question had an added family twist.
Her father, Tom Mitchell, always insisted his own father, Upper Murray pastoralist Walter Edward Mitchell, had taken Paterson to the remote station in the NSW High Country near the Victorian border, where the poet met Riley and the pair later yarned over a bottle of whisky.
“Apparently Jack Riley liked his whisky ‘little and often’,” Honor said. “In fact he liked it so often that by the next morning the bottle was empty and Riley was out of sorts.”
Honor and her siblings were not entirely convinced.
“As kids we used to think Dad was bullshitting,” she said.
Her elder brother Harry even bought an aerosol can labelled “Bullshit Spray”, which sat on the kitchen shelf for years and came out whenever one of their father’s stories seemed a little too good to be true.
Decades later, Honor found evidence that made the story considerably harder to dismiss.
It also helped draw together the threads of the new Banjo Paterson High Country Trail, linking the places, people and landscapes behind Paterson’s enduring connection with the mountains.
Officially launched at the Man From Snowy River Museum in Corryong in April, the trail stretches from the NSW High Country west into the Riverina and across north-east Victoria, linking places including Gundagai, Tumut, Yass, Wee Jasper, Cooma, Kiandra, Jindabyne, Kosciuszko and Tom Groggin.
There’s no set way to follow the trail and the experience is deliberately low-key.
Instead of new information boards, an illustrated map brings together photographs, motifs and lines from poems linked to each place, with QR codes opening up the stories behind the landscape, the verse and Paterson himself.
Visitors can dip into a handful of sites, build a longer road trip around them or, for the more adventurous, travel some sections on horseback in a nod to Paterson’s lifelong connection with horses.
In the more remote stretches, where mobile coverage can disappear altogether, visitors are encouraged to carry the brochure or download the material before setting out.
The idea began about six years ago during the wet winter following the 2020 bushfires and amid COVID lockdowns.
At the time Honor, the granddaughter of famed Light Horse commander General Sir Harry Chauvel, was working on the Chauvel Border Light Horse Trail, mapping sites significant to Australia’s mounted troops.
But Paterson kept coming to mind.
“During my years as an army wife I had always taken with me an anthology of Paterson’s poetry as it was one of the threads that linked me with my home country,” she said.
There was also a family and military connection. Chauvel and Paterson were near contemporaries at Sydney Grammar School, both were in South Africa during the Boer War and both later became closely associated with Australia’s mounted forces during World War I.
While Chauvel commanded the Desert Mounted Corps, Paterson served with the Australian Remount Service, helping train and supply horses for the Palestine campaign.
Combined with Paterson’s association with the High Country through poems such as The Man from Snowy River, the two trail ideas began developing side by side.
A visit to Banjo Paterson Park in Yass, with its replica bust and verses from his poetry, proved another important step.
“I immediately thought that our bush poets in Corryong needed to come over to Yass to see how the town commemorates its famous son,” she said.
The visit helped crystallise the idea of linking the High Country places associated with Paterson and his poetry.
Then, in 2022, came the discovery that changed the way Honor viewed her father’s stories.
Johnny Riley pointing out “The Pilot” ascending Kosciuszko. Photo: Honor Auchinleck.
In Paterson’s great-grandson Alistair Campbell’s book Banjo Paterson: A Life in Pictures and Words from the Banjo Paterson Family Archive, she found photographs of Jack, or “Johnny”, Riley.
The images showed Paterson had indeed met Riley and travelled through Corryong and the Upper Murray.
There was more evidence in her own family records.
In 1962, Tom Mitchell wrote to the Corryong Courier recalling a drinks party hosted by his mother in 1936, where Paterson was a guest.
Tom said he asked the poet exactly who the Man from Snowy River had been.
“Banjo told me that the man was to a large extent imaginary – but was woven around Jack Riley,” Honor said.
Tom also spoke of a letter he had received from Paterson, but despite family searches after his death in 1984 and again after the death of Honor’s mother, The Silver Brumby author Elyne Mitchell, in 2002, it was never found.
Elyne’s own connection to the High Country provides another thread through the project.
“Paterson’s poetry held an amazing fascination for Elyne,” Honor said. “She quoted The Man from Snowy River in her first book Australia’s Alps.”
Elyne later wrote the Snowy Brumby series and the novelisation of the film The Man from Snowy River.
Honor sees the same appetite for adventure in Paterson that she saw in her mother.
She points to his participation in the 1905 Dunlop Reliability Trial and, the following year, his decision to accompany JM Arnott by motorcar along the old gold road through Yass, Jindabyne and Cooma.
“Great heavens!” she said. “Imagine it when the roads were little if any more than the tracks made by bullock wagons, some horse-drawn vehicles and cattle pads.”
Ultimately, Honor hopes the Banjo Paterson High Country Trail encourages people to look beyond the famous verses and see the country that helped shape them.
“The High Country has a capacity to inspire,” she said.
“It is about the connection between wilderness and humans and the capacity of the landscape to work on the human psyche.”
For Honor, the trail has also become something more personal – a journey through Paterson’s country that finally gave one of her father’s best stories the last word.
“If Tom were still alive he would have let me know that I’d had my comeuppance,” she said. “He was no bullshitter.”
