The Rhyme of the O'Sullivan and Pro Bono Publico

The Rhyme of the O'Sullivan and Pro Bono Publico

"The Rhyme of the O'Sullivan and Pro Bono Publico" is a satirical narrative poem by Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson, first published in The Evening News on 21 May 1904, taking aim at the free-spending public works policies of New South Wales politician E. W. O'Sullivan (thinly disguised in the verse as "the O'Sullivan"). The poem is framed as an encounter and dialogue: the narrator, Pro Bono Publico ("for the public good," a stock Latin pseudonym Paterson uses to stand in for the ordinary taxpayer or the anonymous letter-writing citizen of the era's newspapers), is out walking the streets when he falls in with a shabby, down-at-heel stranger — a "seedy man" whose appearance is a comic contrast to the grandeur of the story he is about to tell. The seedy man launches into his tale "in solemn tones and slow," recounting how he was once a towering figure of public life: the acknowledged "Fountain Head" of progress, the architect of a "Democratic Arch" of reform, a man before whom councils and deputations bowed and who commanded government money as though it were his own. In his heyday he tells of building bridges, opening railways, sinking dams, and funding water and sewerage works across the colony with an open hand and no regard for cost — the poem's comic engine is the gap between the man's remembered magnificence and his present, ragged state. He boasts, in effect, that "a million pounds or two was naught at all to me," conjuring an image of a politician who moved public funds by the hundreds of thousands as casually as pocket change, showering favours on whichever town or shire could make the loudest claim on his attention. The turn of the poem is the reversal of fortune: this same grand dispenser of public money has fallen from office and influence, and is now reduced to the humiliating position of a private creditor chasing paltry, unpaid accounts — "paltry £ s d" — from the very country councils and municipalities that once benefited from his largesse. The joke is pointed and specifically political: having spent the public's millions without a second thought while in power, the O'Sullivan cannot now recover a few pounds owed to him personally now that he is out of it. Paterson uses this irony to needle the extravagance and fiscal recklessness he associated with the era's public-works ministers, suggesting that lavish spending of other people's money is easy, while collecting one's own modest due is hard — a moral about the difference between wielding the public purse and possessing a private one. Throughout, the seedy man narrates his own decline with a kind of wounded, self-important nostalgia, still clinging to the trappings of his former importance even as his shabby appearance and current predicament undercut every claim. He is less a tragic figure than a comic one: pompous, self-pitying, and oblivious to how completely his circumstances have inverted his old boasts. Paterson's satire draws its humour from this mismatch between grandiloquent memory and shabby present reality, a device he uses elsewhere in his verse to puncture political self-importance. The poem closes with Pro Bono Publico's reaction to the story: rather than any harsh judgment, he responds with a rueful, half-sympathetic reflection, musing that he himself would not mind having a share of the money the O'Sullivan once spent so freely — a closing line that turns the satire back on the ordinary citizen-narrator too, since his sympathy is really envy of the very extravagance the poem has just mocked. This wry, self-implicating final note is typical of Paterson's lighter satirical pieces: the joke is not only on the fallen politician but, gently, on the public that both criticizes and covets political largesse. As a piece of occasional journalism-verse rather than one of Paterson's better-known bush ballads, the poem belongs to his topical newspaper output — verses written quickly for the daily press to comment on current events and personalities, in the tradition of Australian colonial and early Federation-era political doggerel. It uses a jaunty, sing-song rhyme scheme and colloquial diction, consistent with Paterson's broader style, but its subject is urban and parliamentary rather than pastoral, aiming its comedy at the political and administrative class of turn-of-the-century Sydney rather than at bushmen, drovers, or outback life. Its lasting interest lies chiefly as a period piece of political satire, a snapshot of public reaction to a specific minister's spending record, preserved because it was collected among Paterson's gathered verse rather than for any enduring universal theme.

By Andrew Barton Paterson · First published 1940 · Genre: Political Satire, Narrative Poetry, Social Commentary · 378 words

First lines

Pro Bono Publico / Went out the streets to scan, / And marching to and fro / He met a seedy man,

Who did a tale unfold / In solemn tones and slow, / And this is what he told / Pro Bono Publico.

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poetry · ballad · narrative-verse · satire · Irish-culture · Australian-poetry · public-service · rhyming-verse · character-study · social-commentary · classical-form · verse-drama

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The Rhyme of the O'Sullivan and Pro Bono Publico is listed on Textopian as a poem by Andrew Barton Paterson, dated 1940 CE.

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