Waltzing Matilda

Banjo Paterson, age 31, listened while one of his girl friends strummed on a zither, and invented a song he called Waltzing Matilda. It was an invention; it was not written, composed or set down carefully on sheet music. Paterson pieced it together out of odds and ends of Australian bush life while attending a house party, and was astonished when it became one of the world's popular songs. He was a lawyer then and was to become a leading racing writer for Sydney newspapers.

He was also a jockey, a trainer, a horse dealer, a gambler, a cavalryman, a turf historian and a poet and novelist whose works were often about horses and horsemen—the best writer on horse racing, all things considered, in the English language.

Paterson fabricated Waltzing Matilda at a place called Dagworth in central Queensland in April 1895. As a young lawyer he was making a tour for clients of remote properties. Dagworth was a sizable sheep ranch in flat dry land straddling the Diamantina River. The nearest town, Winton, was 84 miles away. Paterson and his fianc�e Sara Riley were house guests along with half a dozen other young people. Sara was visiting her friend Christina MacPherson, whose brother managed the station. Christina had recently gone to the races at Warrnambool, 150 miles from Melbourne, and remembered a tune played by the band there. She hummed it, or her variation thereof, and picked out the tune on an Autoharp, a form of zither in which dampers are pressed down, muting all the strings except those of the chord to be played. Christina did not know the words or the name of the song, so Paterson obligingly improvised lines that fitted the notes Christina recalled:

Oh! There once was a swagman camped in a billabong,
Under the shade of a coolabah tree;

A swagman was a hobo. A billabong was a watercourse, alternately flooded and dry. A coolabah was a sparsely leafed tree with a white trunk found along the riverbeds in the hot Queensland plains.

And he sang as he looked at his old billy boiling,
"Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"

A billy was an improvised tea kettle, usually made from a discarded meat tin by the addition of a wire handle. A swagman carried his belongings rolled in a blanket that rested on his shoulders like the arms of a dancing partner. So it became common in the bush to call the bundle Matilda and to refer to a hobo's meanderings as waltzing.

The four verses of the song related in a somewhat jumpy fashion how the swagman grabbed a sheep—a jumbuck—that drank at the waterhole, stowed the carcass in his pack, was detected by the owner, questioned by the police, jumped in the waterhole and drowned by the coolabah tree.

Up to the time he got involved with Waltzing Matilda there was nothing mysterious about Paterson's life, no questions asked. But so much has been written about that house party at Dagworth that it sometimes seems Paterson never did anything except attend it. For years Australians have been arguing about Waltzing Matilda, what it is, what it means, who wrote it and whether or not it really is the Australian national anthem. At least two books and half a dozen articles have concentrated on the question of authorship, the pro-Paterson group accepting the Dagworth story as summarized above and the anti-Paterson adherents insisting that Waltzing Matilda was an old folk song that Paterson claimed as his own.

It is hard to think of anything about Waltzing Matilda that has not been investigated. Everyone present at the Dagworth party has been checked out, and the family histories of the guests and neighbors. Something akin to an hour-by-hour account of the party has been pieced together. ("After tea, in the cool of the evening, all adjourned outside and sat in front of the house. Had there been a lawn they would have sat on the lawn, but there was no such luxury at Dagworth.") The high point of these bacchanalian revels was a trip to a neighboring station, 100 miles away, to watch a demonstration of fire-fighting equipment. That may not seem like much of a party, but at the time it was an occasion for singing, dancing, drinking and other unrehearsed entertainment. At this second station, known as Oondooroo, Herbert Ramsay (later Sir Herbert) was visiting his cousin. Ramsay was a tall, lean baritone who looked like Cary Grant playing the part of a titled Englishman. Never one to resist an invitation to sing, he put on an old hat, stuck a pipe in his mouth, slung a blanket over his shoulders and entertained everyone with his interpretation of the unfortunate swagman at the billabong.