Waltzing Matilda

Just me

And my feet

And my swag

In the heat

Just me

All alone

With the dreams

that I own

It’s a dance

of a kind

stripped down

and bare

Come walk

with me

Try a smile

if you dare

It’s a life

that I live

With my world

in a bag

I don’t have

a house

or a boat

0r a Jag.

It’s not a dance

or a girl

or a square

stable home

It’s the earth

and the sky

and the road

that I roam.

Just a waltz

down the lane

With the dust

in my eyes

Matilda and me

Have said

our goodbyes.

4 thoughts on “Waltzing Matilda”

    1. Thanks for the link. An important part of Australian history. I dreamt about writing a poem about ‘Waltzing Matilda’ the other night and don’t understand why it came up like that. It was so random. I know the song. It’s so good, very moving. I thought it was mostly a love story until I started reading up about it after my dream.

      Someone on the ‘Social Australia’ forum said Matilda meant sex workers that followed soldiers around and someone said ‘humping the bluey’ meant the swag became a lover in the evenings. I went right down the rabbit hole with this one.

      https://www.socialaustralia.com.au/topic/2132-why-matilda/

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      1. I think they were pulling your leg.

        In Australia, ‘humping’ just meant carrying a heavy or awkward load until we picked up the overseas meaning in the late 20th century. When I was a teenager I could safely talk to my grandmother about ‘humping my kid sister around’ without fear of embarrassment (or arrest).

        I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find any woman’s name that hasn’t been used as slang for sex workers somewhere at some time, but I’ve never heard ‘Matilda’ used for it in Australia; and I used to live with sex workers in Kings Cross in the early 1980s. OTOH, ‘Matilda’ was once universally understood to mean a swag or bedroll, though doubtless with connotations it was a substitute for a wife or girlfriend.

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      2. BTW, the original Banjo Patterson lyrics to Waltzing Matilda (not the Eric Bogle ones) were sordid elitist propaganda from the 1894 shearer’s strike.

        A friend of Patterson owned Dagworth Station, where the strikers were being organised by ‘Frenchy’ Hoffmeister. He was tipped off that the station owner had been offering money to have him bashed or murdered so he decided discretion was the better part of valour and did a runner. But the station owner claimed he’d stolen a sheep and organised a posse of local cops to pursue him. He brought his corpse back with a bullet hole in the head, claiming Hoffmeister had committed suicide rather than risking capture. Problem was he didn’t own a gun and there was no explanation as to how he’d got one.

        The following year Patterson was visiting his friend and wrote a song reinforcing the ‘suicide’ story. The station owner’s daughter modified an old Scottish marching tune for the music.

        Ironically the song was adopted by Australian socialists ignorant of its origins as an emblem of the working class preferring death over submission to the ruling class.

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