Boots

Boots by Andrew Barton Paterson

"Boots" is a World War I ballad by Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, first published in 1917 in his collection "Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses," in which the humble army boot becomes the emblem of Australian national character forged in battle. The poem opens in the pre-war outback, recalling the varied, improvised ways Australians once got about the country — "humping their swag" on foot behind Cobb & Co.-style coaches ("per Joe Gardiner"), swimming rivers like the Diamantina with their gear bagged above their heads, or riding in a "superior motor car." This catalogue establishes the Australian as resourceful and adaptable, at ease with any mode of travel the bush demands. Paterson then pivots to the war: when these same men were sent to fight in Europe, there was no such choice of conveyance — no Ford, no Rolls-Royce — only marching, and they went to it "in our good Australian boots." The boot thus becomes the great leveller, the plain democratic equivalent of the horse, coach, or motor car that had carried Australians through peacetime. The poem's second movement turns to how the Australian troops (the AIF, the "diggers") were initially perceived by the British and other Allied commands. They were dismissed as "mad Australians," criticised for a lack of formal discipline, and mocked for the casual, egalitarian way officers and enlisted men "fraternised" with one another — a democratic informality that struck the more class-bound British military culture as reckless and disrespectful, "wild, and out of hand," supposedly holding "nothing great or sacred" in reverence. Paterson presents this as an outsider's misreading of what was in fact a different, self-reliant code of mateship carried over from bush life, not an absence of discipline but a different form of it. The turn of the poem is its proof by combat. Whatever their reputation among the brass, in "the thickest of the fray" the Australians' conduct spoke for itself: their boot-prints could be tracked past the shell holes, and — crucially — those tracks ran only one way, forward. The image is simple and visceral: the physical trace of the boots in the mud becomes evidence of advance, courage, and refusal to retreat, silencing the earlier accusations of indiscipline with a plain physical fact. Having earned its case, the poem widens its view to array the Australians alongside their fellow Allied troops, sketching each with a quick, affectionate epithet: the Scottish Highlanders are treated as close kin ("next of kin"), the Irish soldiers are praised as good company ("a treat"), and the Americans ("the Yankees"), who arrived late to the war supremely confident, are gently needled as men who "knew it all and had to learn" — that is, who had lessons in war's realities still ahead of them despite their bravado. This roll call situates the Australians within the larger community of Allied nations, comparing national character types with a mixture of pride, humour, and camaraderie rather than rivalry. The poem closes by drawing together its two threads — the bush-bred practicality of the boots and the proving of character in France — into a statement of national arrival. The Australian army "kept beside" its allies, "did its bit and took its chance," matching the larger, older nations in the shared ordeal. Paterson frames this collective service explicitly as a birth: he "hailed our newborn nation and its fruits," casting the war as the true making of Australia as a nation in its own right (Federation in 1901 had created the political union, but here it is the shared trial of the AIF, following closely on the Gallipoli campaign that had already become central to Australian self-image, that Paterson credits with forging a genuine national identity recognised by others). The final image returns to sound rather than sight: the poet listens to "the clatter on the cobblestones of France" made by the "good Australian military boots," an aural signature of the marching diggers that closes the poem on the same homely, unglamorous object with which it began. Formally, the poem is built as a ballad in Paterson's characteristic vigorous, driving metre and rhyme, with each stanza working its way back around to a variant of the boot image — "good Australian boots," "ammunition boots," "military boots" — so that the refrain-like repetition binds the whole poem's argument to its one controlling symbol. In this way "Boots" performs in miniature the larger cultural work for which Paterson is best known: taking a plain, unheroic piece of everyday bush or military equipment and using it to define an egalitarian, self-deprecating, yet fiercely proud vision of Australian identity, continuous with the mateship and practical resourcefulness of his outback ballads but now tested and validated on the battlefields of the First World War.

By Andrew Barton Paterson · First published 1940 · Genre: War Poetry, Military Poetry, Poetry · 357 words

First lines

-"The Australian boots were the best of any issued to the Allied forces."

We've travelled per Joe Gardiner, a humping of our swag / In the country of the Gidgee and Belar. / We've swum the Di'mantina with our raiment in a bag, / And we've travelled per superior motor car, / But when we went to Germany we hadn't any choice, / No matter what our training or pursuits, / For they gave us no selection 'twixt a Ford or Rolls de Royce / So we did it in our good Australian boots.

Similar titles

Genres

Tags

Australian poetry · World War I · military · patriotic · ballad · historical · soldiers · national identity · narrative poetry · bush poetry · courage · WWI era

What this Textopian page supports

Boots is listed on Textopian as a poem by Andrew Barton Paterson, dated 1940 CE.

This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.

Good citation fit

More by Andrew Barton Paterson