Masterpiece, no. For the most part, Australians know only a few lines of it -- one naturally being "Murder! Bloody murder!", which we would yell at the top of our voices while reciting at school and thought that the teachers (especially the nuns!) would keel over from shock. They didn't 
What is most beloved about Banjo and his fellow "national poet" Henry Lawson is the characters. "The Man from Ironbark" passed very quickly into our (relatively new) pantheon of folk heroes, as did Clancy of the Overflow (which poem, by the way, is considered a masterpiece, along with The Man From Snowy River). In this, they're not so different from Tam O'Shanter -- who knows all of that? -- or even Paris, Helen and the Trojan gang.
The basic rule is, the lighter the subject the simpler the style. This is not always true, of course, and often a light subject/style can mask much deeper things, but there's no point in writing a joke that hardly anyone can understand.
What is most beloved about Banjo and his fellow "national poet" Henry Lawson is the characters. "The Man from Ironbark" passed very quickly into our (relatively new) pantheon of folk heroes, as did Clancy of the Overflow (which poem, by the way, is considered a masterpiece, along with The Man From Snowy River). In this, they're not so different from Tam O'Shanter -- who knows all of that? -- or even Paris, Helen and the Trojan gang.
The basic rule is, the lighter the subject the simpler the style. This is not always true, of course, and often a light subject/style can mask much deeper things, but there's no point in writing a joke that hardly anyone can understand.
It could be worse