The Oh, Welcome back everyone to one thousand one classic short stories entails this is your host John

Hagenorn I have three great banjo-Patterson stories for you today banjo

Patterson as many of you already know, was an Australian poet, journalist, and writer who focused

his work on the rural and Australian Outback areas around New South Wales.

He was best known for his folk song, Waltie Matilda, and his poems, The Man from Snowy River,

and Clancy of the Overflow.

He had a great knack for capturing the peculiarities and charms of people and places in his stories.

Our first story today is called his masterpiece.

Greenhide Billy was a stockman on a Clarence River cattle station and admittedly the biggest liar in the district. He had been for many years pioneering in the Northern Territory, the other side of the sundown, a regular furthest out man,

and this assured his reputation among station hands who weren't rank according to amount of experience.

Young men who have always hung around the home districts,

doing a job of shearing here or a turnit horse breaking there,

took with reverence on Riverine or Macquarie River shearers who come in with tales of runs where they have 300,000 acres of

freehold land and sheared 250,000 sheep.

These again pale their ineffectual fires before the glory of the Northern Territory man who has all

corners on toast because no one can contradict him or check his figures.

When two of them meet however they are not fools enough to cut

down quotations and spoil the market. They lie in support of each other and make all other

Bushmen feel mean and pitiful and inexperienced.

Sometimes a youngster would timidly ask Greenhide Billy about the Terra Incognita.

What sort of place is it, Billy? How bigger the properties? How many acres had you in the place you were on?

Acres be damned? Billy would scornfully reply.

...