Waltzing Matilda

Waltzing Matilda (1895), Banjo Paterson

‘Waltzing Matilda’ perhaps doesn’t belong in the Canon’s Poetry section and might be better placed in the Song section. It is, after all, best known as a song, Australia’s unofficial national anthem, but its author Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson did include it in Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses, his 1917 poetry collection. Regardless, Waltzing Matilda’s words (and melody) are to generations of Australians almost as well-known as their birthplaces.

Waltzing Matilda was born in 1895 when Paterson visited Winton, New South Wales. He was living in Sydney and working as a lawyer but wrote poetry and freelance journalism under his pen name, ‘The Banjo’. He took a holiday to visit his fiancé, Sarah Riley, in Winton, and also checked out life on sheep stations. He came across the stories and places that would inspire Waltzing Matilda and, when at Dagworth Station, wrote the words while Christina Macpherson played on piano her memory of an old tune called ‘Craigielee’. It was later discovered her tune bore little resemblance to that song and the first published version of the music (1903) used a different tune entirely. Called the “Marie Cowan version”, it’s the tune now identified with the song, a tune similar to a much older song called ‘The Gay Fusilier’, which Paterson may have heard during time he spent in South Africa.

Waltzing Matilda was first recorded in 1926, performed by John Collinson and Russell Callow. In 2008, this recording was added to ‘Sounds of Australia’ in the National Film and Sound Archive, where it’s noted the song has been recorded more than 600 times in Australia and internationally:

“The entire history of Australian recorded music can be traced through versions of Waltzing Matilda. Just about every craze, fad and fashion in popular music has generated a recording of the song.”

Waltzing Matilda had the chance to become our national anthem when it and other songs were put to a referendum in 1974 to replace ‘God Save the Queen’. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ won and so we sing of ‘golden soil and wealth for toil’ rather than poor bugger swagmen. As former Prime Minister Paul Keating said in a speech honouring the song’s centenary in 1995 “[i]t has long been our unofficial national song. Not our anthem…one can't sing too solemnly about a jumbuck.” Neither can one sing too flippantly about a thief on the run who suicides.

Waltzing Matilda is the world’s only song to have its own cultural centre, in Winton, and the song often pops up and reminds us of its cultural centrality. In the late 1990s, Rod McQueen, Australia’s then rugby union Wallabies’ coach, asked John Williamson for an Australian song to counter the New Zealand All Blacks’ haka. Williamson went straight for Waltzing Matilda and was invited to sing it before a 1999 Bledisloe Cup match, with 104,000 singing along in Sydney’s Stadium Australia. It became Australian rugby union’s national song at every game, so loved that when 2003 Rugby World Cup officials pushed to disallow its performance alongside the national anthem, Australian rugby officials went ballistic – and even the Kiwis backed them up:

“The haka has become a tradition for New Zealand," said All Black captain David Kirk at the time, "and singing Waltzing Matilda has become a feature of rugby in Australia, so there's no reason to undo that just because it's the World Cup.”

Perhaps because it’s linked with rugby, or because we live in an era in which anything with a whiff of colonialism is anathema, but the haunting ballad of Waltzing Matilda is now often viewed as pure jingoism. There is great loss in this – the song should be an intrinsic, celebrated, and studied part of the nation’s cultural fabric, a point writer Monica Dux makes. While she opines that much ‘Australiana’ culture overlooks or downplays Aboriginal dispossession and suffering, she’s also disappointed she has children who don’t know Waltzing Matilda:

“It’s not just my aversion to jingoism that has resulted in a pair of children who can’t sing a single bush ballad,” Dux writes. “It has more to do with the internationalised world they inhabit, one that all too often obscures what’s local and home-grown…After all, Waltzing Matilda is a lovely little song, and a delight to sing. And I do sometimes wonder whether we’ve done much better in trading some of our local culture for the hyper-commercial global version we see on YouTube and social media.”

While it might be traded out in the city, it’s hard to see Waltzing Matilda, unlike its protagonist, ever dying in the Australian bush. And, beyond being a good tune to sing, a melancholic masterpiece, it’s universality has surely helped its longevity. Yes, it’s a song of suicide, but it’s also a protest song. Whatever the enemy does, in this case the police, they’ll never catch the swagman alive. They won’t get that satisfaction. And what makes it a great protest song is its inherent humanity, reaching beyond politics to matters of the human spirit. Socialists might claim it a protest song in honour of the miner’s strikes of the period, while those of a more liberal persuasion might claim it as a song honouring the swagman’s independence, but Waltzing Matilda manages to be both – and more. That’s the hallmark of great art and the reason why it’s still sung – and recorded – more than a century after it was first brought to life on a sheep station.

This appreciation of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was authored by Melbourne writer and academic Heath Remington, in 2025, specifically for The Genius of Australia.

Main photo credit: Chris Fithall, Flickr.