Scots Heritage Australia

Waltzing Matilda ~ Banjo Paterson

Banjo Paterson has long been considered the creator of the lyrics of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Some commentators believed he adapted the words from an existing bush ballad, but he is now mostly thought to have written its original song lyrics in 1895 whilst staying with the Macpherson family on the property, Dagworth Station, approximately 100 kilometres north-west of the town of Winton in Queensland.

The origins of the tune are more complex. The discovery around 1970 of an original musical manuscript (today held in the National Library of Australia as MS9065), together with an undated letter by Christina Macpherson to Thomas Wood recalling the events surrounding the creation of the song, has finally led to Christina being accredited as the first ‘creator’ of the music. Yet as Christina openly acknowledged, she simply adapted the tune from an existing folk song.

According to Christina Macpherson, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was created in the sitting room of Dagworth Station in January of 1895 with the help of a young solicitor and poet, Banjo Paterson.

Christina Macpherson was at Dagworth for the Christmas of 1894, having travelled from Victoria to be with her father and brothers for the first family gathering since the death of her mother in early December.  On the journey up to Dagworth, Christina had stopped to meet her father at Winton, where her old school friend Sarah Riley lived. Sarah’s fiancée of eight years, Banjo Paterson, was staying with the Rileys at the time and the pair were also invited to Dagworth as guests.

Paterson was country-born and a horse-lover; in fact, his name ‘Banjo’ came from one of his father’s favourite horses. He enjoyed riding around Dagworth Station with Christina’s brother Bob Macpherson. During their rides, Banjo and Bob visited the scenes of a recent dispute between the shearers and their employer. The shearing shed on the property had been burned in protest at a wage agreement proposed by Queensland squatters and later a swagmen—shearer who had taken part in the disturbance, ‘Frenchy’ Hoffmeister, was found dead at a nearby camp.

Christina’s memory of how ‘Waltzing Matilda’ came into being was reported in an undated letter to Thomas Wood:

[Banjo Paterson] was on a visit to Winton, North Queensland, and I was staying with my brothers about 80 miles from Winton. We went in to Winton for a week or so & one day I played (from ear) a tune which I had heard played by a band at the Races in Warnambool [sic], a country town in the Western District of Victoria. Mr Patterson [sic] asked what it was—I could not tell him, & he then said he thought he could write some lines to it. He then and there wrote the first verse. We tried it and thought it went well, so he then wrote the other verses. I might add that in a short time everyone in the District was singing it...When Mr Patterson returned to Sydney he wrote and asked me to send him the tune. I am no musician but did my best: & later on he told me he had sent it on to a musical friend of his who thought it would make a good bush song. It was included in the Student’s Song Book and was frequently sung at the Community Singing.

The song came into being as part of the after-dinner musical entertainment at Dagworth. Based on musical and documentary evidence, the tune which Christina Macpherson heard played by the band at the Warrnambool steeplechase was almost certainly the Scottish song ‘Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea’. Robert Tannahill wrote the words in 1805 and in 1818 James Barr set them to music - music that, in turn, was possibly based on the old melody of ‘Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself’ . Thomas Bulch arranged James Barr’s effort for brass band in 1893 with the alternate spelling, ‘Craigielee’. There is also speculation about the relationship it bears to ‘The Bold Fusilier’, a song dated, in some sources, back to the eighteenth century.

The tune was sprightly and appealing, but the fact that Christina did not know any words gave Banjo Paterson an opportunity to demonstrate his poetic powers and impress the assembled gathering. It seems that Banjo also wanted to impress Christina too, as there is evidence to suggest he was attracted to her.

The two spent the evening and more hours in the next few days fitting Banjo’s words to Christina’s version of the tune. Perhaps the result could be read as a romanticised story of the swagman—shearer Hoffmeister’s death, commemorating the defiant spirit behind his militancy; or perhaps the words hark back to the earlier suicide by drowning of a ‘swaggie’ at Combo waterhole between Dagworth Station and the town of Kynuna. Banjo would have heard the story of the drowning from Bob Macpherson as they rode around the district together. 

That aside, it seems that the song began to do the rounds of the district by word of mouth soon after the collaboration by Christina and Banjo. Sydney May, author of the first researched book on ‘Waltzing Matilda’ asserts that, in April 1895, Christina and Banjo visited Robert Ramsay’s station at Oondooroo, closer to Winton, where the baritone singer Herbert Ramsay lived and where there was a decent piano on which to perform and refine the song. Some years later, Ramsay sang the song at the request of the Queensland Governor, Lord Lamington, at the Post Office Hotel on 29 September 1899. It is also reported that ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was sung at Mick Fahey’s Kynuna Hotel in 1895 during a champagne celebration to mark the final settlement of the Great Shearer’s Strike that had occurred in 1894.

In 1902 the first published version of the ‘Waltzing Matilda’ lyrics was printed by the Hughenden Observer, a Queensland newspaper. Leaflets setting out the words were pasted up in pubs for a sing-along to celebrate with the ‘Greenhide Push’ procession of riders through the town. However, which tune was sung is unknown.

‘Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigie-Lea’ was typical of the kind of compositions in the early nineteenth century designed essentially for private use during intimate social occasions—to be sung to the accompaniment of the pianoforte. Styled in the form of a traditional song, it focused on a pleasing union of melody and Scottish poetry. The music of ‘Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigie-Lea’ is typical of many Scottish and Irish ‘folk’ airs being widely disseminated at the time in printed music editions, harmonised or arranged with piano accompaniment. The song was first published in 1818 and reprinted in numbers of anthologies of Scottish songs of the period. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was represented in John Greig’s monumental work, Scots Minstrelsie 

Though this song is always designated as an original composition by James Barr, it is possible that the tune well was derived from an old Irish ballad, perhaps ‘Ga’ng to the De’il’. In a letter to Harold White, then National Librarian, of 3 March 1969, W.R.F. Bolton of Cobb and Co Ltd, Toowoomba, wrote:

When looking through some old Sydney May papers which he left with me some years ago, I found the rather unusual point that the first publication of Craigielea, was not recorded in the ‘Scots Miniature Musical Museum’ in 1818, but in a periodical called The Nightingale. The Librarian at the National Library of Scotland suggested that perhaps Tannahill himself adopted the music of ‘Ga’ng to the De’il and Shake Yourself’ an old Irish ballad and slowed it down to suit the words of ‘Craigielea’. We have been lucky enough to obtain a copy of ‘Ga’ng to the De’il’ and on hearing it played have no doubt that it is the same as the music of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

Source: National Library of Australia