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.
Things In My Head 
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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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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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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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