“WALTZING MATILDA”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 June 1942, Page 4

“WALTZING MATILDA”

AN UNOFFICIAL ANTHEM. Working from London in the middle of a war, the 8.8. C. does not always find it easy to get the right people at the right time to produce programmes representative of the life and history of the various Dominions. On Anzac Day, on April 25, it was particularly lucky, since Dr. Thomas Wood was at hand, the godfather of “Waltzing Matilda.” He is also, as many English and Scotsmen will know, the author of that entrancing book “Cobbers,” which has done more than most to explain the Australian to his kinsmen in the Home Country. So much by way of formal introduction. Introducing Thomas Wood himself is a much easier job. He is not essentially a musician, nor essentially a writer or a traveller. He is simply a man with the gift of comradeship who has had the luck and energy to travel over a large part of the English-speaking world. Short, with untidy grey hair, and very , thick lenses to his spectacles, Thomas Wood is the sort of person you don’t notice the first minute you see him, and the sort of man you never forget afterwards.

Thomas Wood, by the way—he asks for this correction to be made —is not the composer of “Waltzing Matilda.” In “Cobbers” he gives its history. The verses were written by Banjo Patterson in the town of Winton, and the tune was written by Patterson’s sister on the same evening. Wood’s contribution was to harmonise it and godfather it to the world. Its adoption by the Australian troops in Libya, has now made it undoubtedly the Battle Anthem of Australia. Wood showed remarkable prescience when he wrote, as long ago as 1934, “Good ‘enough to be the_unofficial National Anthem of Australia.”

His insight into Australian character is also shown in his contemporary reference to the “grim mouths and deep-set unsmiling eyes” of the Western Queenslanders. “What their descendant's will look like a century hence I can only guess but one thing I am sure of. If we have not stamped out war by then, any enemy they may meet with bayonet has my pity.”