Mulligans Mare - Analysis

A yarn that pretends to warn you

Paterson’s central joke is that this poem offers itself as a moral lecture about vice while spending most of its energy making vice look thrilling, clever, and communal. From the opening, Mulligan’s bar is painted as a glorious den: a place to drink, and to fight and gamble and race, where the choice spirits gather. The poem’s admiration is hard to miss; it treats the bar as a little kingdom of swaggering characters, and it wants you to enjoy being there. Even the names—Jerry the Swell, jockey-boy Ned, Dog-bite-me—turn the crowd into a comic gallery, as if the whole scene runs on nicknames and bravado rather than law.

The mare as the gang’s secret proof

Against this lively chaos, the mare becomes something like the gang’s hidden competence: a bad un to look at but a good un to go. That contrast matters, because it’s also the poem’s ethic. Appearances (respectability, legality, even beauty) are less important than performance and nerve. Whenever they backed her, you safely might swear she’d win—so the mare functions as the one dependable thing in a world otherwise built on risk and bluff. She is both a racing animal and a kind of folk-myth: the “flyer” that makes luck feel earned.

The hinge: the Queen’s law walks into the pub

The story turns sharply when official power arrives: A bailiff turned up with a writ of fi. fa. and announces in the name of the Queen. The tone stays jocular, but a real threat enters—debt becomes confiscation. Mulligan’s response is telling: he wants one on the jaw but instead stood him a drink. Violence becomes hospitality, not because Mulligan is reformed, but because this world solves problems through performance and improvisation. The drink is a feint, buying time for the “consultation” that follows. The poem’s tension crystallizes here: law and money are serious, but the gang insists the only winning move is style.

Cheating the bailiff—and letting him cheat himself

The plan—slip out the real mare and replace her with the old broken-down hack—is a classic bush trick: swap the object, fool the authority. Yet Paterson complicates it by giving the bailiff his own greedy imagination. Once he believes he has Mulligan’s mare under watch, he doesn’t just guard her; he schemes to profit, sending a wire to friends to lay the whole lot against her. That moment makes the bailiff less a victim than a rival gambler in uniform. The poem’s moral universe isn’t simply crooks versus the law; it’s one set of bettors versus another, with the Queen’s name functioning like a costume the bailiff wears while he tries to take his own “slant.”

The race as vindication of nerve

When the race arrives, the poem shifts into pure celebration: the mare appears with thoroughbred air, fit as a fiddle, and once the boy gave her her head she smothered the field. The racing details aren’t there to teach technique; they translate risk into a clean, physical certainty—front-running, cornering, then overwhelming dominance. The payoff is equally blunt: the win puts Mulligan clear of his debts, and the ending twist is that he not only pays the bailiff but gives him a hiding. In other words, the poem rewards deception and punishes the representative of law—not for being lawful, but for trying to play the same crooked game and losing.

The “warning” that doesn’t quite behave

The final stanzas try to close the door on all this fun: take warning, keep clear of the running, keep clear of the booze, and never bet on a thing that can speak. But the poem can’t fully mean its own sermon. After watching the gang outwit authority, and after seeing fortune arrive in the shape of a flyer, the moral reads like a wink—a socially acceptable sign-off after a tale that has been, for most of its length, a toast to audacity. The lasting contradiction is the poem’s most Australian kind of humor: it tells you to be prudent, while showing you—in bright, noisy scenes at Mulligan’s bar—exactly why prudence is boring.

If the bailiff hadn’t tried to profit, would the gang’s trick feel as satisfying? The poem seems to need his private betting wire—his urge to serve my own ends—so that the swindle can pose as justice. Paterson lets us enjoy the punishment because the official has already joined the race, stepping down from law into appetite.