Clancy of the Overflow: How Squatters Made Australia Rich
My great grandfather, John Clancy, migrated to Australia from Cork with his parents in 1841, to find a better life. Their story is typical of the period: following little success on the Bendigo gold fields in Victoria in the 1850s, the family moved to Deniliquin in south-west New South Wales around 1870, where John and his young family squatted, establishing a sheep run. His passion was horses, a love shared with A.B. “Banjo” Paterson, a Sydney lawyer from a wealthy sheep property in New South Wales, who became immortalised in Australian literature through his poetry promoting the pleasures of outback life. The two men developed a friendship through this common interest.
The late 1880s and early 1890s were a devastating time on the land: the worst drought on record, a rabbit plague destroying arable land, economic downturn, product price collapse, and government dysfunction led 1200 New South Wales squatters to walk off their land by 1900, abandoning 8 million acres. John…
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