Banjo Paterson Travelling with fiancée, Sarah Riley, they met with her old school friend, Christina Macpherson, who had recently attended a race at Warrnambool in Victoria. She had heard a band playing a tune there, which became stuck in her head and replayed it for Paterson on the autoharp. The melody also resonated with him and propelled him to write "Waltzing Matilda" While there has been much debate about what inspired the words, the song became one of his most his widely known and sung ballads. In addition, he wrote the lyrics for songs with piano scores, such as "The Daylight is
Hay and Hell and Booligal Hay and Hell and Booligal Hay and Hell and Booligal is a poem by the Australian bush poet Banjo Paterson. Paterson wrote the poem while working as a solicitor with the firm of Street & Paterson in Sydney. It was first published in "The Bulletin" on 25 April 1896. The poem was later included in Paterson's collection "Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses", first published in 1902. The poem is about the western Riverina town of Booligal; then and now a remote, isolated locality. It compares Booligal unfavourably with the nearby town of Hay and even Hell, recounting a