Once a jolly swagman…
How the bush ballad we love (or love to hate) was popularised by tea. By Adeline Teoh.
You might feel sorry for the jolly swagman. Here’s a happy traveller, stopping by a waterhole for a cuppa when an opportunity – in the form of a sheep – wanders down to take a drink. Hungry, perhaps – or broke, maybe – the swagman decides it’s dinner and tries to stuff it into that portable pantry, his tucker bag. Unfortunately for our friend here, he doesn’t get to finish his cuppa because the sheep’s owner and three long arms of the law happen by and he decides that, rather than get caught – penalisation in colonial Australia tending toward the brutal – he’d rather drown.
When Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson first wrote the lyrics to ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in 1895, the protagonist was not ‘jolly’ as the popular song now makes him out to be, and he never sacrificed himself to avoid being arrested. But by the time Banjo published the song he’d added the final verse about the drowning, referring to the death of Samuel Hoffmeister, who chose to shoot himself rather than be captured during an 1894 shearing strike that turned violent.
Banjo wrote the lyrics near the site of the incident in Winton, Queensland (now home of the Waltzing Matilda Centre) based on a tune his friend Christina Macpherson heard a military band play while attending the Warrnambool steeplechase in Victoria, ‘The Craigielee March’*. Christina reproduced the tune from memory on her autoharp.
The first published version begins:
Oh there once was a swagman camped in the billabongs,
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,
And he sang as he looked at the old billy boiling,
"Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?"
Banjo later sold the rights to ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to the Billy Tea Company, owned by James Inglis, who liked how it fit with the brand’s image, trademarked as a swagman boiling a billy for his Billy Tea. The tea merchant’s accountant had a musical wife, Marie Cowan, who gave the song a new musical arrangement, though she had clearly known of the original as her version still has shades of Craigielee. The altered version is the one we usually hear today:
Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his ‘Billy’ boiled,
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."
Comparatively, the Billy Tea version repeats the third and the fourth lines as a refrain in the way the original does not, to emphasise the billy boiling. It also capitalises ‘Billy’.
Inglis & Co published Marie Cowan’s version and gave away the sheet music with packets of Billy Tea – a ‘gift with purchase’. It meant, of course, that people played it at singalongs, an advertisement for Billy Tea in the days before radio.
According to the National Film and Sound Archive, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is one of the most recorded songs in the world – more than 500 artists worldwide have a version of it. It is one of Australia’s most popular bush ballads and almost became our national anthem during the 1977 national plebiscite. (‘Advance Australia Fair’ had 43% of the votes, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ 28%, ‘God Save the Queen’ 19% and ‘Song of Australia’ 10%.)
If there’s one thing you should take away from this iconic swagman, however, it’s probably this: make tea, not crime.
* ‘The Craigielee March’ by Thomas Bulch was itself based on a Scottish song, ‘Thou Bonnie Wood O' Craigielea’, written by Robert Tannahill and composed by James Barr.
Image below: A Billy Tea ad featuring its packaging, a swagman meeting a kangaroo (National Library of Australia)
