Harry Krause wrote:
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 fianc=E9 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.



- - -

Great story, eh?

***************

With all the verses considered, this silly song about a billabong has a
deeply spiritual meaning and also makes a caustic comment about the
traditonal British class/caste system.

Note that the main character in the song is a poaching hobo. He's
probably guilty of the same sort of minor crimes that got many of the
original Europeans "transported" to Australia in the first place. Maybe
a bit of Sherwood Forest down under...

When confronted by the upper class authorities, the hobo cries out,
"You'll come a-waltzin' Matilda with me!" and drowns himself in the
bog. Since "waltzin'Matilda" is apparently Aussie slang for bumming
with a bindle, the dying hobo is reminding the posse that at the moment
of their own deaths they too will be without class, privilege, or
status and certainly no better off than the hobo himself.
They will be "waltzin' Matilda" into the great beyond.

Everybody in the graveyard is about equally well off. :-)