Culture

The Scotsman who wrote "Waltzing Matilda"

April 27, 2010
An ANZAC day poppy, to be worn on 25th April
An ANZAC day poppy, to be worn on 25th April

I spent Friday morning watching my nine-year-old son take part in an Anzac (Australia and New Zealand army corps) day assembly at the school in Perth, western Australia, where he has been a temporary pupil for the last three months. He was one of the kids who read out poems in the solemnly performed ceremony, and I felt an awkward sting of pride. Not so much because he read well, which he did, but because a child of mine could participate in, and briefly belong to, a patriotic celebration of another culture.

His mother being a Kiwi, Eric has more than an incidental reason for taking part in memorials to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps soldiers who fought and mostly fell at Gallipoli in April, 1915. And there were other pupils, the Asian ones in particular, who clearly had less historical connection, but who were equally at ease with the contemporary nationalism–far more overtly nationalist than Remembrance day is in Britain–of an event I found moving in a way I could not immediately pin down.

There I was, an off-centre Scottish Brit, caught up in the unfamiliar emotion of watching my half-British, half-New Zealand son celebrating the unambiguously-advertised Australian qualities of, above all, “mateship”. It was a puzzle brought home to me when the pupils in Eric’s year all began to sing verses from “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” Now, what was that about?



The song is a story in itself. Though its subject is Gallipoli, it was really an anti-Vietnam war protest ballad, composed by the Scottish folksinger Eric Bogle, who originally came from Peebles: a town where I used to play some raggedy-arsed village cricket (despite the fact that half of Scotland thinks it’s a game only played by the English). How, I thought, did a Peebles boy come to write a song riffing on the unofficial national anthem of Australia, which decries the horrors of war, specifically the most futile battle that Anzac forces ever participated in; a song popularised by the alcoholic British-Irish lead singer of the Pogues; and which would end up being sung by patriotic Australian school-kids to celebrate the bravery of soldiers who in reality died before they had a chance to show whether they were actually brave or not?

Not only was the songwriter Scottish (and the populariser Irish) and two generations apart from the first world war, but his song makes some interesting historical errors – most particularly with the line “in the hell that they called Suvla Bay, we were butchered like lambs at the slaughter”. In fact, it was British and not Australian forces who were slaughtered at Suvla Bay.

As an elderly Anzac veteran who spoke to the kids of Claremont primary school made clear, the assembly, and the song (with the more gruesome verses removed), were being used to impart three very simple lessons to the children. That the suffering of earlier generations was to be remembered, that war was cruel but sometimes necessary, and that the life they now led in western Australia was a fortunate one. Nothing wrong with any of that, as far as I was concerned – and I was pleased my British-New Zealand son could be a part of it.

But that song still niggled. Eric Bogle wrote it in 1971, having emigrated to Australia only two years earlier, and by riffing on Waltzing Matilda he was calling on elementary Aussie emotions. This was clearly about more than protest against the Vietnam war. My guess is that Bogle, by knitting together improvised strands of folk tradition, was providing himself with a cultural passport as he composed. Waltzing Matilda itself, though its tale of the swagman’s ghost is as Australian as a prototype of the modern nation can be, has a tune which is based on a late 18th century Scottish ballad, The Bonnie Wood of Craigielea. And you don’t have to be too sophisticated with your genetic profiling in Western Australia to recognize people drawn from a stock of Scottish and Irish faces–albeit markedly improved by good weather and exercise.

So there’s my boy, dressed as an Australian, learning about mateship and singing riffs on Australian culture–written by a Scotsman, riffing on an Australian song which was itself a riff on a Scottish one. All recent stuff this, too: the past being massaged to fit primary school history and modern Australian patriotism. No reference to more recent migrants or older aboriginal history. Once upon a time, I would have seen in this nothing but expediency, artifice and fakery.

But I reckon, of all the parents there, I was perhaps the one who felt this event with the sharpest emotion – it was all new to me, it was my first time in the country, and I had never previously given a thought to this strange loop of Celtic identity-fabrication. I bet I was the only one there thinking: Eric Bogle, what did you do? How bloody Scottish is this?

Of course, it looked Scottish to me mainly because I am Scottish, in an awkward, living-in-London-with-half-Kiwi-kids sort of way. Though the Scots (responsible for composing the songs of an empire that was associated chiefly with the English) have a certain talent for smuggling their identities in through other cultures-second only, perhaps, to the Jewish genius. This is really how all national culture is made: devised from circuitous and tangled trace-lines to actual events.

Through all his anti-war fervour and folksy political outrage, Eric Bogle was smuggling through a desire to belong to his adopted country which was also a bitter nostalgia for his old one–inaccuracies, reinventions and all. My son’s Anzac day wasn’t fakery, it was people finding ways to allow themselves to be and to belong. And being at home in the world is a strange and complicated business.