Banjo Paterson - Australia

From National Geographic, August 2004, "Banjo", an excellent article on the poet of Australia.

When he finished school at 16, he joined a law firm as a lowly clerk and began a life of higher paying drugery in the desk-bound world of the city. H worked his way up the office ladder and qualified as a solicitor when he was 22.
By the time he landed the brief to dune the elusive Clancy, he had been behind a desk for nine years, fidgeting under the weight of his own expectations. Poetry became his escape, Clancy his muse.
"It's a question of what you're willing to give up. He had a pretty lucrative career going. Living a footloose drover's life wasn't something he really wanted to do, so much as something he would love to have done. He'd have liked to have had a romantic past like that to look back upon."
And so he created one. ...

Clancy of the Overflow:
Banjo was a lawyer in Sydney. He had a client come in who needed a debt collected from one Clancy. His threatening letter to Clancy came back undelivered, marked on the back: "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving and we don't know where he are." From the poem:
And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he face the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal --
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow
p. 21:
Australia saw itself: a nation of quite, determined underdogs who would one day surprise the doubters and do great things, and a people who could rise fearlessly to any occasion and never give in, no matter how tough the going. The others might rein up at the mountaintop, terrified of the ground that lay ahead, but...

p. 29:
"Our 'ruined rhymes' are not likely to last long," he wrote in one of his last published essays, a couple of years before his death in 1941. "But if there is any hope at all of survival it comes from the fact that [we]had the advatage of writing in a new country. In all the museums throughout the world one may see plaster casts of the footprints of weird animals, footprints preserved for posterity, not because the animals were particularly good of their sort, but because they had the luck to walk on the lava while it was cooling. There is just a faint hope that something of the sort may happen to us."