Thank you so much, Living Arts Canberra for your conversation with Dianne Wolfer and your lovely review.

Dianne Wolfer spoke to Barbie about The Colt from Old Regret

Erica Wagner’s watercolour and mixed media collages form the visual and Dianne Wolfer’s rhythmic prose the textual story for this version of Banjo Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River legendary tale.

The title of the picture book immediately tells us what the artwork conveys: that the young horse carries the point of view. While all the human faces are obscured and the human beings mostly take their position in the background, almost every horse has clear and striking facial features. There are also many more horses than men in the visuals for the contemporary telling.

Twenty-six pages depict the new telling and 10 the Paterson poem. The original is definitely given weight, as indeed it deserves, having become, like the poem’s ‘Man’, a household word in Australian culture and a standard in bush poetry.

There are other key difference in these versions. The Paterson almost entirely comes down on the side of the rider as its hero. The hardy mountain pony who makes the chase with the Man is, however, almost given partner status because of his ‘courage fiery hot’, but he ends the chase with blood from hip to shoulder.

These are the lines of the original that stop us in our tracks. The climax and the denouement are entirely about chase and capture, gutsy masculine heroics.

In the Wolfer and Wagner telling, it is freedom that wins the day. Few living creatures will willingly give up their freedom for confined comfort and the mountain ponies are of this ilk. The mountain air, the scents of the trees and the sanctuary of the wild seclusion are far stronger than any monetary value that motivates the men to the chase. Capture breeds an unlikely alliance between Colt and Stallion, while the smell of burning flesh from the branding invokes fury.

As Dianne Wolfer comes to her own ending of the tale, she reverts to a Paterson-like verse form, mimicking the rhythm if not the rhyme pattern of the original. It’s a tilt at those gutsy heroics of the men – heroics not heroism – and gives the reader pause for thought about the nature of courage and the rights of the colonial herders compared with those of the wild creatures.

And this is just one issue the book will present for possible discussions with young readers and their adults. There is so much in this story when seen from a contemporary perspective.

We can talk about the diverse views on brumby culls, the environmental impact of feral animals on national parks and pristine bushland, the very notion of animals in captivity and the morality of relationships between human beings and other animals.

The final pages give us information about Banjo Paterson, bush poetry, brumbies and the historical possibilities of the ‘real’ Man from Snowy River.

It’s a wonderful book for classrooms but equally as beautiful as an object for home shelves. Adults of my generation will remember learning swathes of the Paterson in primary school classrooms and will here be given the opportunity to see it with new eyes – a horse’s eyes perhaps, but also perhaps just a 21st century human perspective.

The original holds its place as a riveting tale of hardy bushmen riders, and reveals the mores of the time with its strongly masculine view of Australian life and culture. The new version expresses the more ‘sentimental’ relationship we have today with animals.

The NLA publishers have done readers a service in setting the parallel works side by side, with the magnificence of the Snowy Mountains ever present in Erica Wagner’s superb artwork.

Thank you to National Library of Australia Publishing for my review copy and to Dianne for a most interesting discussion about the book, Paterson’s original, the many facets of the new interpretation of the story and the felicitous marriage of image and word in this production.