Instead it became a love song to Australia. I began to write A Waltz for Matilda as a story of the swagman. But there was no proof, so he was set up for another crime, and ‘died trying to escape’. Banjo Patterson’s song is almost certainly based on a true event: in 1895 a swagman- shearer, ‘Frenchy’ Hoffmeister, was suspected of burning down a shearing shed in a shearer's strike. The poddy sheep was used as bait for the swaggie- and then the troopers pounced. I suddenly realised that Waltzing Matilda is really about about a setup. How could three of them just happen to be on the scene when the swaggie caught the jumbuck? Or take this line: ‘Down came the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred, up rode the troopers, one, two, three…’ In the 1890s troopers were pretty thin on the ground in a vast country.
And back in the 1890’s he’d have known his listeners would have known it too. Unless the jumbuck was a ‘poddy’, or orphaned sheep brought up by humans, hoping for a scratch and a handout, you’d never get near it.īanjo Patterson knew this- he’d grown up on a sheep farm. It’s more likely to be the other way round: I remember vividly being dragged 100 metres along a road by a stroppy ram.
And he sang as he stuffed that jumbuck in his tucker-bag …’Ī jumbuck is a fully grown sheep- you can’t stuff one into a tucker-bag single-handed. ‘Down came a jumbuck to drink at the billabong, up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee. When I took a closer look as an adult, though, suddenly the song seemed to have meanings I’d never looked at before. Like most of us, I learned the words to ‘Waltzing Matilda as a child. It is also a love story – about a girl, and about the land. Paterson and from events rooted in actual history, this saga tells the story of how Australia became a nation. It is also the story of others who had no vote and very little but their dreams. Set against a backdrop of bushfire, flood, war and jubilation, this is the story of one girl’s journey towards independence. She also discovers that enduring friendship can be the strongest kind of love. With the help of Aboriginal elder Auntie Love, the ladies of the Women’s Temperance and Suffrage League and many others, Matilda confronts the unrelenting harshness of life on the land and the long-standing hostility of local squatter, Mr. Finally the book was twice as long as I had expected, more saga than story. Other voices kept intruding, more whispers from the past. It wasn’t quite the book I thought I was going to write, either. This is, perhaps, the best book I have written.
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