Thanks, Harry. It's been about 30 years since I've read the history of
Waltzing Matilda. (Just FYI, a billabong is a small ox-bow lake formed by a
meandering river, and it's "coolabah" although most versions spell it the
way you did). Got anything like it for The Star Spangled Banner?

Regards,
Franko

"Harry Krause" wrote in message
...
This was in my in-box today, and I thought it too good to not pass along.

On this day in 1864 A. B. ("Banjo") Paterson, the Australian bush poet
who wrote "Waltzing Matilda," was born in New South Wales.

The story of the creation of Australia's unofficial national anthem is
an engaging one, a convergence of history, politics, biography,
etymology and irony that unravels in all directions. In 1894 Paterson
was a thirty year-old city lawyer with a distaste for both cities and
the practice of law. He preferred horses, history and his outback home,
and writing ballads about them. While on a visit with his fiancé to
Dagworth Station (large ranches, originally run by the government on
convict labor) in Queensland, Paterson was taken with a nameless tune
that he heard his hostess play on the piano from memory. Having decided
to set words to it, Paterson immediately found his raw material in his
host's guided tour of the Station, which included a description of those
events surrounding the eight-day Shearers' Strike several months
earlier. The "swagman [a drifter or itinerant sheep-shearer, carrying
his swag or blanket-roll] camped by a billabong [waterhole]" was Samuel
"Frenchy" Hoffmeister. He was a militant member of the Shearers' Union,
thought to have been the one responsible for burning down the Dagworth
woolshed, killing 140 sheep. He was not relaxing "under the shade of a
coolibah [eucalyptus] tree" but hiding out. If "he sang as he watched
and waited 'til his billy [tin can of water] boiled," it would have been
very softly. When the swagman "stowed that jumbuck [sheep] in his tucker
[food] bag" he was adding the fuel of poaching to the fire of political
and class war. When "up rode the squatter [wealthy landowner], mounted
on his thoroughbred," backed by "the troopers, one, two, three," it was
a contest no swagman -- least of all a militant
unionist-arsonist-poacher -- could win. When he suicidally "leapt into
the billabong," crying "You'll never catch me alive," it was the leap of
a cornered, outback, underclass, convict-bred martyr, to the cry of 'up
yours, mate.'

"Frenchy" Hoffmeister, the historical swagman, shot rather than drowned
himself, and was from German stock, as was the expression "waltzing
Matilda." Auf der walz means to 'go on the tramp' or hit the road, used
in Germany to describe traveling workers or soldiers on the march; a
Matilda came to mean those women who followed the soldiers, to 'keep
them warm.' Eventually the soldier's greatcoat or blanket was a Matilda.
Thus Paterson's swagman-hero was not only without justice, or food, or a
way out, but a woman's warmth. And the nameless tune that Paterson first
heard at Dagworth Station and took for his swagman turned out to be a
version of the "Craigielee March," which was itself taken from a
century-old Scottish air called "Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielee." There
may be older, less direct roots for the tune that Paterson made famous,
but "Craigielee" was written by Robert Tannahill, a lonely, semi-cripple
who would escape to the woods, and whose final relief was to kill
himself by drowning.



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Great story, eh?