You’ll Never Take Me Alive or Of Liberty or Death (2012)

‘Waltzing‘, derived from the German term auf der Walz, means to travel while working as a craftsman and learn new techniques from other masters before returning home after three years and one day. ‘Matilda’ is a romantic term for a swagman’s bundle. As a swagman’s only companion, the swag came to be personified as a woman. To ‘waltz Matilda’ is to travel with a swag, that is, with all one’s belongings on one’s back wrapped in a blanket or cloth. 

The exact origins of the term ‘Matilda’ are disputed. One derivation is that when swagmen danced with their swags when they met each other at their gatherings, as there were no women to dance with. However, this appears to be influenced by the word ‘waltz’. German soldiers also commonly referred to their greatcoats as ‘Matilda’ because the coat kept them warm, as a woman would.  Early German immigrants who went ‘on the waltz’ would wrap their belongings in their coat, and took to calling it by the same name their soldiers had used. In the Australian bush a man’s swag was regarded as a sleeping partner, hence his ‘Matilda’.

Taking on a life of its own, the song Waltzing Matilda has been appropriated by many Australians as an anthem, a ballad of the fair go, with an absence of knowledge of the history behind it.

The song tells the story of an itinerant worker capturing a jumbuck* to eat. When the jumbuck’s owner arrives with three policemen to arrest the worker, he drowns himself in a small lake and goes on to haunt the site. A more contentious story is that the real swagman immortalised in Waltzing Matilda didn’t drown himself in a billabong but was most probably murdered beside one, assassinated to silence the rebellion of the 1894 Shearers’ Strike. 

*Jumbuck is a pidgin word which found its way into Australian English as a word for `sheep’.

Musical Saw: Michael Bridges