Cirrus@Austlit

Editor's preface to Great Racing Stories: 'Like Britain and America, Australian readers also had a favourite horse racing writer in the early years of this century. He was Andrew 'Banjo' Patterson, whose knowledge of the Turf in his native country was unrivalled and whose commentaries on the sport in print and on the radio were unsurpassed for more than 30 years. Like his American contemporary, Paterson created a group of horse racing enthusiasts - 'the sporting men of Mulligan's - who featured in a number of his tales.

Banjo Paterson had developed his enthusiasm for horses in his childhood and chose sporting journalism as his career. He was for many years a racing journalist on the magazine Truth, and later editor of the Sydney Sportsman. He possessed a marvellous ear for catching the conversations of the people who made up the world of Australian racing, and his weekly broadcasts on ABC radio were notable for the wit and good humour he extracted from this eavesdropping.

Apart from his journalistic work, Paterson published general collections of short stories, poems and a highly-authoritative work, Racehorses and Racing in Australia. Of his stories about the 'sporting men of Mulligan's', the following tale of a 'sting' that goes wrong is among the very best and has been called a classic of Australian short story writing.'