Waltzing Matilda

Mark Steyn has a great post discussing some national anthems of former British colonies, and the vapidity of recent compositions, drained of any spirit by the dead hand of political correctness, at his site, steynonline.com
Best of all, Steyn has some good background on "Waltzing Matilda":

As the metropolitan reaction to Steve Irwin’s death reminded us, not all Australians want to be celebrated for the blokey camaraderie of the bush. No doubt it’s very frustrating when Sydney has so many fine Thai restaurants and firebreathing imams to be continually cheered in popular culture for boomerangs and kangaroos and mates and cobbers and larrikins. But, musically, you can’t beat something with nothing, and “Advance Australia Fair” is one big zero. We’ve been frolicking down the “W” end of the folk-song index – “Wallaby Stew”, “Wild Colonial Boy” – and we’ve only just reached the biggest “W” of all:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

The poet Banjo Paterson is traditionally credited with the song in the form we know it today, though some scholars continue to question this. Still, the song we know today began life in January 1895, when Paterson was visiting the Macpherson property at Dagworth Station in Queensland, north-west of Winton. Also visiting, from Victoria, was Christina Macpherson, who'd come home to spend Christmas with her father and brothers after the death of their mother. One day Christina played Paterson a tune she'd heard at the races in western Victoria, and the poet said he thought he could put words to it. The tune is said to have been "Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea", but there was also an 18th century English marching song called “The Bold Fusilier”. Paterson claimed never to have heard the earlier lyric but its pattern is so similar it’s impossible to believe that “Matilda” wasn’t laid out to the scheme of the earlier number:

A gay Fusilier was marching down through Rochester
Bound for the war in the Low Country
And he cried as he tramped through the dear streets of Rochester
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?

Who’ll be a sojer?
Who’ll be a sojer?
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?

Marlborough being the Duke thereof: Winston Churchill’s forebear. “Cried as he tramped”? “Sang as he watched”? Don’t tell me that’s not a conscious evocation. Nonetheless, “Waltzing Matilda” is a splendid improvement on the original. If you're a non-Australian who learned the song as a child, chances are you loved singing it long before you had a clue what the hell was going on. What’s a swagman? What’s a billabong? Why’s it under a coolibah tree? Who cares? It’s one of the most euphonious songs ever written, and the fact that the euphonies are all explicitly Australian and the words recur in no other well known song is all the more reason why “Matilda” should have been upgraded to official anthem status.

And yes, a “swagman” is a hobo, and this one steals a “jumbuck” (sheep), but he ends up drowning, which gives the song a surer moral resolution than most similar material. Yet in a sense that’s over-thinking it. It’s not about the literal meaning of the words, but rather the bigger picture that opens up when they’re set to the notes of that great rollicking melody: the big sky and empty horizon and blessed climate, all the possibilities of an island continent, a literally boundless liberation from the Victorian tenements and laborers’ cottages of cramped little England. Few of us would wish to be an actual swagman with a tucker bag, but the song is itself a kind of musical swagman with a psychological tucker bag, a rowdy vignette that captures the size of the land. One early version of it went “Rovin’ Australia, rovin’ Australia, who’ll come a-rovin’ Australia with me” – which is a lousy lyric, but accurately describes what the song does.

One sign of the song’s muscular quality is the number of variations. Of the rock’n’roll crowd’s monkeying around with it, I think I’ll stick with Bill Haley and the Comets’ goofy “Rockin’ Matilda”. The Pogues-Tom Waits approach – “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, “Tom Traubert’s Blues” – seems to me to glum up the works unnecessarily. To use it for the story of a soldier who loses his legs at Gallipoli is unduly reductive: It’s too good a real marching song to be recast as an ironic marching song. I don’t know whether today’s diggers march to “Matilda” in Afghanistan and Iraq and East Timor but it’s one of the greatest marching songs ever, and today as a century ago it remains the great Australian contribution to the global songbook:

Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.

Happy Australia Day!