"WALTZING MATILDA"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 158, 3 July 1942, Page 7

"WALTZING MATILDA"

The Story Of The Song

Listeners who have heard Peter Dawson sing "Waltzing Matilda" on his recent visit, will be interested in this item from the "Radio Times." It was contributed by Dr. Thomas Wood, author of " Cobbers," who has, the "‘ Radio Times" says, "helped to make ‘Waltzing Matilda’ Australia’s Battle Hymn." e¢ HE Australian troops went into . Bardia singing ‘Waltzing Matilda.’ That’s official. Doesn’t it make your hair curl?" It was Hubert ‘Foss speaking on the telephone: a trunk call from London. He and I and "Waltzing Matilda" have been mixed up a good deal together these last eight years. Gradually we have seen this song make friends for itself throughout four continents and the Seven Seas. But promotion to a battle hymn was a step indeed, My own share in the fame of " Waltzing Matilda" is modest. Here is its outline; I went to Australia in 1930. Almost the last person I saw before I left was Stephen Jack, the actor. He said to me: "There’s a song out there you ought to get hold of. I know no more than a line or two, but it is a clinker." I looked for it, but the problems of trains, transport, dust, and distance got in the way. If you yourself have had to travel in Australia, where the journey of a thousand miles is a commonplace, you will understand. And each day the day’s work had to be done. Bits and tags and ends of "Waltzing Matilda" seemed to be scattered all over the continent, but I found neither text nor tune by such deliberate search as I had time for. Discovered at Last I came across both by chance. This was at Winton, in Queensland, a town

that stands up from the plain as rocks rise out of the sea. There’s heat in Winton, and sand, and glare; but if you want to know what friendliness can be, go there, and meet T. J. Shanahan, of the North Gregory Hotel. He gave me a welcome as warm as the weather, and two words set us on common ground at the start. Those words were "folk songs." There are none in Australia. It was settled too late. The one Australian song, I said, that had the right smack was " Waltzing Matilda." Did he know it? Did he not. Out of that evening, and perhaps a can of beer, came this taleall true; Written on the Spot Some forty year's ago " Banjo" Paterson, Australian poet, was staying with his friend Robert McPherson at Dagworth, a sheep station eighty miles out of the town. They were driving into Winton one day in the buggy when they passed a man carrying his swag. " That’s what we call ‘Waltzing Matilda’. in these parts," said McPherson, and "Banjo" was so struck with the phrase that he wrote the verses right off, basing them on a Dagworth story of a swagman who did indeed kill a jumbock (sheep) in a billabong (waterhole) and roused McPherson’s fury. "Banjo’s" sister wrote the tune. They sang it in the North Gregory Hotel that night. When I got back to England, I published, with permission, ‘" Waltzing Matilda" in a book of mine. Hubert Foss was the publisher, That was in 1934. Since then we have spent some time and energy and goodwill in telling the world that here is a jewel, and helping Australians themselves to see that in "Waltzing Matilda" they have a national anthem worth the name.