Waltzing Matilda

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30793, 3 July 1965, Page 12

Waltzing Matilda

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DERRICK ROONEY.)

\VALTZING Matilda, waltz- ’ ing Matilda, who’ll come waltzing Matilda with me—everyone has heard it, or sung it, at some time. But few think of it as a folk-song in the ordinary sense, even though its creation, content and circulation make it a superb example of the folk process at work. It began—according to the popular story which Banjo Paterson’s son has accepted—when a squatter’s daughter went to the races. The threads that tug a. folk song from obscurity to immortality are at best fragile; but it is enough for them to exist. In the case of “Waltzing Matilda,” the thread stretches a year from the time Christina Macpherson’s father, Ewan Macpherson, took her to the Warrnambool races in Victoria in April, 1894, before he moved north with his family to join his brother on the Dagworth station in Queensland. At Warrnambool Christina heard the Warrnambool Garrison Artillery Band play an arrangement by Godfrey Parker of an old Scottish tune, "The Bonnie Wood of Craigielea,” and the melody stuck in her head.

On the way to Queensland Christina met an old schoo 1 friend, Sara Riley, and invited her to stay at Dagworth. Miss Riley arrived with a young man in tow. His name was Paterson, his first book had just been published and he was using a long vacation to get a first glimpse of Queensland. Aha, you say. The stage is set for a fairy-tale romance: the young man, whose name is Banjo Paterson, hears Christina play the tune, falls in love with it and her, writes words for it, and they live happily ever after to the sound of violins and the ringing of cash registers as millions flock to buy his latest hit. Well, it didn’t happen like that. Paterson married neither Christina Macpherson nor Sara Riley, and “Waltzing Matilda” was no overnight hit. Indeed, it was not even published until 1903, when Paterson, broke and about to be married, sold it to Angus

and Robertson in a pile of manuscripts which he called “old junk.” What is certain is that Paterson heard Christina play—on a borrowed autoharp—the tune of “Craigielea” and was captivated by it Paterson’s own account was that, “I said to her ‘Why don’t you sing the words to that?’ Christina replied, ‘lt hasn’t any words that I know of, but it must have had at one time. I believe it is an old Scottish tune’.”

So Paterson got a tune in his mind. And there the matter would have rested—if the skein of coincidence had not continued. Robert Macpherson later recalled that while Paterson was riding beside Christina’s brothers, three unconnected incidents occurred: they discovered a dead sheep with a forequarter missing, and the Macphersons told Paterson what had probably happened; they visited a waterhole and told Paterson how a wanted man had been drowned while trying to escape the police; a station hand mentioned having seen