‘Oh, thank you!’ She was gone in a flash of blue skirt and white petticoat, her boots stamping up the steps.
Matilda heard the clang as the piano was opened and the first bars of music. If she listened closely she could almost make out the tune.
‘She’s only been learning for a year,’ said Tommy apologetically.
Matilda smiled. ‘At least she’s enthusiastic.’
The girl began to sing. ‘Once a jolly swagman …’
‘I didn’t know you knew,’ she added quietly.
‘That the song was about your father? I guessed. It isn’t hard. The swaggie, three troopers, the squatter and a billabong. But they never mentioned you.’
‘No. The songs rarely mention the women.’
She started slowly toward the verandah, with him beside her. ‘Where’s her mother?’
‘She died,’ he said gently. ‘Anna’s brother too. Diphtheria. They both died a year ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She found that she meant it: sorrow for his loss; sorrow for what Anna must have felt; and sorrow for the pain that she herself had known as well.
‘I am too. We had been married over a year when I heard about James.’ He added, ‘Mary was … gentle.’
She smiled. ‘Not like me.’
‘No. Not like you.’
She led the way up onto the verandah. ‘I saw your photo in the paper, years ago. You both looked happy. I wanted to write to you, tell you I was glad for you, but I didn’t have your address.’
‘Matilda, I’m sorry. Sorry to vanish. Sorry I couldn’t fight for you or accept you as you were. I was hurt and I was angry. I thought you had married James, and by the time I knew you hadn’t …’ He hesitated. ‘I can’t say I am sorry I married Mary. I’m not. I wouldn’t have married her if you were still in my life. But it was a good marriage, and a loving one.’
‘I’m glad.’ She was glad that she meant that too. She sat in one of the verandah chairs.
He sat in the one next to her. ‘I remember these chairs.’
‘The ones my father made. I brought them from Moura when I came here.’
‘I went to Moura first. They said at the hotel that you own Drinkwater now, but I didn’t know you had moved here.’
‘You were looking for me?’
‘I was looking for you.’
She nodded at the car. ‘Did you make that?’
He laughed, leaning back. ‘No. I made my money in radios. The ones the poor blighters are using in the trenches now, in fact.’
‘So you’re rich?’
‘I’m rich. I gather so are you.’
‘Yes.’
He looked at her, seriously again. The piano pounded from inside, though the girl had stopped singing. Matilda wondered if the tune she was playing was still ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
‘Why have you come now?’
‘I thought you might need help. I keep in touch with some of my old mates from here. I know it’s hard on most farms now. So many men gone to the army.’
‘Just as you always came to help me before?’
He flushed. ‘Not that you always needed it. And I couldn’t for a while. It wouldn’t have been fair to Mary.’
‘But now you can?’
‘Now I can.’
He had waited a year out of respect for the woman who had been his wife. She found that she was glad of that too. This was the Tommy she had known: the bone-deep integrity. Tommy who was true to his friends, and true to his wife, as well.
She sat back, staring at her acres, almost empty of sheep. Saplings were growing again, olive heads taller than the grass.
‘No, I don’t need help. Not that sort of help, anyway.’ She met his eyes. He was still Tommy. The one person in all the world, she thought, who will always tell me the whole truth, even if it hurt. Why had she never realised that friendship was the deepest kind of love? ‘But I would still like you to stay.’
‘For how long?’ His voice was cautious.
She smiled, knowing this time that she had to say it for him. ‘Forever, if you want to.’ Tommy would never tell her she was beautiful. Never say sweet words that might come from a novel.
‘You never danced with me,’ she said suddenly. ‘Never. Not even once.’
‘I don’t dance.’ He met her eyes. ‘You didn’t understand, back then. I never asked you because I didn’t dare.’
He lifted his scarred hand. The scar had faded like the one on his face, though the fingers were still slightly twisted.
‘So you left?’
‘Tommy Thompson couldn’t compete with a James Drinkwater.’
‘Matilda O’Halloran couldn’t compete with electric generators in a city.’
He stared at her. ‘Electric generators are portable, you know. There is nothing I can do in the city I can’t do here, with a bit of money to lubricate things.’
It was like the first shaft of sunlight gleaming along the river. Suddenly she saw what marriage might be like: not two people sharing one life, managing a farm together, but two lives, linked by love and trust.
He was still looking at her. ‘Matilda, would you really have chosen me instead if I’d stayed?’
She looked at her hands, then back at him. She would tell the truth too. The whole truth, just as she always had. ‘I don’t know. You never gave me a chance to find out.’
He hesitated. She could see he was choosing his words with care. ‘Maybe if you’d chosen me, we mightn’t have been happy. Not then. I had to be your protector in those days. I was Mary’s protector too.’
‘And I’ve never been someone to be shut up in a cage, even a loving one?’ She smiled. ‘But things are different for Mr T. Thompson, inventor and businessman? I kept your photo,’ she added. ‘It was the only thing I had of you. Except the car, of course … do you know it still runs? Well, almost. And the stock troughs and — and everything really.’
She stood up, then held out her hand to him. ‘Will you dance with me now?’
He looked startled. ‘“Waltzing Matilda”?’
‘Exactly that,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I may not dance, but I know that tune isn’t a waltz.’
She laughed. ‘I don’t think you can tell the difference when Anna plays it.’
‘True.’ He took her hand in his, then put his other hand on her waist, looking into her eyes. ‘Darling Matilda. I’ve been driving the last twenty miles trying to talk to Anna and all the while thinking: what if she sends me packing? Should I have brought you flowers, a basket of fruit?’
‘Just you will do. And Anna.’
‘That’s what I hoped. Will you waltz with me, Matilda?’
She felt like soaring with the cockatoos over her acres, yelling happiness to the world. But a waltz would do to start with.
Inside the girl began to sing the song again. Suddenly it was as though other voices joined her, the whisper of the river, the laughter of the wind. Matilda wondered what Anna would think about a cave and a wall of hands upon a rock.
Matilda put her other hand onto Tommy’s shoulder. He felt as warm as the hills, and as solid. ‘Let’s waltz.’
Notes on the Text
A Waltz for Matilda is fiction, put together from historical facts. There was a swagman and a billabong. I have known women like Matilda, her Aunt Ann and Auntie Love: the women who helped create our history but are so often forgotten by it. The drought, the strikes, the campaigns for federation and new laws were much as I have described them here. Most of all the land and its lore are based on the land that is my home. Like Matilda, I have watched it and loved it, seen its changes and been part of its endless generosity.
In one respect, though, I have departed from historical record. The episode that inspired the song ‘Waltzing Matilda’ happened in Queensland. While I have carefully not mentioned where this book is set, it isn’t Queensland. This book is a love song to a nation, but also to a land. The land in this book is the one I know.
This is why I have deliberately not s
pecified which ‘city’ Matilda travels from. It could be one of many. Nor have I given the exact date of the referendum that led to Federation, as they took place at different times in different states. This is a book about a nation, not one state.
‘WALTZING MATILDA’
‘Waltzing Matilda’ is Australia’s national song — though not its national anthem — but few Australians know that it commemorates a real event: the death of a shearer who was suspected of burning down a shearing shed in the shearers’ strike of the 1890s.
‘Waltzing Matilda’ was written by Banjo Paterson, a poet who helped make the bush and the outback seem romantic to people in the city.
Andrew Barton ‘Banjo’ Paterson, CBE (1864–1941) grew up on his family’s property beyond Yass, New South Wales (his nickname ‘Banjo’ came from one of his father’s favourite horses). Although he was born on a farm and loved the bush and wrote about it, he mostly lived in the city, working as a solicitor. His first book of ballads, The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, was published in 1895 and became a smash-hit.
In 1895 Paterson also went to stay with the Macpherson family on their property, Dagworth Station, just over sixty miles north-west of the town of Winton in Queensland. He and Bob Macpherson rode around the station and Paterson heard the story of how the Macphersons’ shearing shed had just been burned — and how a swagman-shearer who was believed to have been part of the disturbance, ‘Frenchy’ Hoffmeister, had been found dead at a nearby camp.
Inspired, Paterson wrote the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Christina Macpherson provided the music, based on a tune she’d heard at the Warrnambool country races (probably the old Scottish tune ‘Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigie-Lea’). Soon everyone in the Winton district was singing the song and, not long after, most of Australia was too. But as with the women in this book, Christina Macpherson’s contribution to what became our national song has mostly been forgotten.
Soon there were several versions of the song being sung, long before the song was first published in 1903. That first printed version is slightly different from the song I learnt as a child, and both versions have been included in this book to acknowledge the many versions that were around, even by 1910.
‘Waltzing Matilda’ came to symbolise the ways the new nation of Australia thought of itself: courageous, contemptuous of authority and with our hearts in the bush. The fact that most Australians lived in cities and towns, even back in those days, and preferred safe jobs to wandering the bush, didn’t matter then and doesn’t seem to now.
I have always loved the song, but for many years have wondered at parts of it. How could the swaggie grab a jumbuck and force it into his tucker bag? I was once a sheep farmer, and remember vividly being dragged on my stomach along a road by a stroppy ram as I gripped onto its leg. Trust me: it is very hard to catch a ram, unless you have it pinned in a yard. Sheep have four legs to pull away from you, and can easily overbalance a human with only two.
But a poddy — a sheep that has been orphaned and brought up by humans — is easily caught, in fact can be hard to get away from.
And what of the squatter and the troopers? The history of the time suggests they must have planned to arrest the swaggie — distances were large, and it’s an enormous coincidence that so many troopers just happened by that billabong.
Where did the poddy come from? Perhaps they had planted the sheep, to tempt the man into grabbing it. Who was the squatter? And how did the world know what happened, there at that billabong, over a hundred years ago? Did one of the troopers tell the story in guilt and shame? I suspect that Banjo Paterson wrote about a frame-up — and that he and his listeners back then knew it. Nowadays the real significance of the song has been partly lost.
The 1880s to the 1930s was a time of many poems and songs about the right of workers to join together to get better conditions. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ was just one of them; another was ‘The Ballad of Joe Hill’, the United States song that also spoke of an unjustly accused union man whose ghost reappears to inspire others.
We mostly think of Australia’s 1800s as a time of spreading rural stations, shearers and stockmen, and men panning for gold. But even then, most Australians lived in cities, and back then conditions in factories were as horrendous as they were in the United States and Europe: dangerous or even deadly machinery; impossibly long hours; small wages that weren’t enough for a family or even one person to eat well, much less pay rent; no holidays except Christmas Day and Sundays; no sick leave or pensions when you got old; and no compensation if you suffered an accident at work. Servants had easier conditions, but they usually only got an afternoon off a month, although considerate employers might let them go to church on Sunday mornings — as long as they sat at the back, and had got up before dawn to put on Sunday dinner and get their chores done.
But Australia was settled as much by people who had rebelled against authority, whether as criminals or as political protestors, as it had been by ‘respectable’ immigrants. The new colonies had some of the earliest trade unions in the world. Even by the 1830s, shipwrights and then other craftsmen banded together to fight for better working conditions.
In the 1880s conditions for most people in Australia grew harder. The land was starting to show scars from decades of hard treatment. The native grasses were being eaten out as, especially in dry times, sheep nibbled the grass so close to the ground that the local perennial grasses died. A long and desperate drought lasted from the mid-1880s to the early 1900s in most parts of Australia. Prices for wheat and wool crashed too. The state governments had borrowed to fund projects when times were good. Now they weren’t able to repay their loans, and work on government projects stopped.
People lost their jobs; employers dropped wages and expected longer working hours. Strikes spread across the country in the late 1880s — ships’ officers, seamen, waterside workers, shearers, miners and many others announced they would stop working until their conditions improved. The colonial governments and their police forces supported the employers. And the bitterness between workers on the one side and employers on the other grew.
By the mid-1880s soup kitchens had to be set up in Sydney and Adelaide to feed the starving workers and their families. And by the early 1890s the Australian colonies were in a serious economic depression.
The swagmen took to the roads and tracks outback looking for work and a cheaper way to live. A swaggie had a spare pair of trousers, comb and towel wrapped up in his swag, or ‘Matilda’, or blanket, strapped to his back, with a billy — an old tin with a handle of fencing wire — in one hand and a hessian sack containing some flour and tea and sugar in the other.
THE DROUGHT AND FEDERATION
This is a book about the land, as well as people. These days we often forget to take the effect of the environment into account. Even as I write this, economists around the world are expressing surprise at the ‘negative growth figures’ caused by the 2010 cold winter in the northern hemisphere — you can’t build houses when snowbound, and much else stops too. But few appear to have figured such possibilities into their forecasts.
If there had been no major 1880s-1903 drought there might not have been the shearers’ strike that was such a major part of the beginning of the labour movement. There might not have been the bank crashes, the hard economic times that led to demands to drop taxes between the states, the uniform immigration policies.
If it hadn’t been for the drought — and the men, waltzing their Matildas — we might still be a loose association of states, and not a nation.
THE SHEARERS’ UNION
In July 1886 the Shearers’ Union was formed after squatters wanted to lower the rate of pay. The shearers were also angry because squatters would claim that a sheep hadn’t been shorn properly and then refuse to pay anything for the rest of the sheep that had been shorn.
Of all the unions, the Shearers’ Union was the most militant. Members refused to work at stations around Barcaldine, in Queensland, unless the S
quatters’ Association met their demands for better conditions. In January 1891 the union called out 200 shearers and rouseabouts as a protest against working with non-union shearers. The strike lasted till 7 August, when the last of the shearers went back to work, after the leaders of the strike had been arrested for conspiracy and sentenced to three years’ gaol. But strikes broke out on other properties for many years, either for better wages and conditions or to protest against property owners employing non-union labour.
THE JOURNEY TO FEDERATION
Members of the various unions had realised that they all wanted much the same thing: an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage for all men and women, workers’ causes represented in parliament, and a way of settling (arbitrating) disputes between unions and employers, instead of using strikes and lockouts, where unionists were locked out without pay and others were employed in their place. The first meeting of the Australian Labour Federation General Council was held in Brisbane on 31 August 1890.
Could the unionists’ dreams be fulfilled with a new national government? Many other Australians hoped the same thing: that a united Australia would mean free trade between the states, helping bring prosperity back again, and that a new federal government would give the vote to women, ensure young children went to school, rather than work in factories, and other just laws.
But other reasons were more selfish: the desire to stop anyone who wasn’t white and English-speaking from entering or settling in the country. This was partly to stop the (slave) ‘kanaka’ labourers who had been brought to Australia mostly to work the sugar fields — their low wages meant that there were no jobs for white workers — and to stop competition from Chinese migration.
Our nation’s founders also wanted uniform tariffs (taxes) on goods coming into Australia to help Australian factories, so they could charge higher prices and pay higher wages. And they were seeking a government that could bring all states together on major projects from defence to building railways.
A Waltz for Matilda Page 38
