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Origins > Origins of Christina Macpherson tune

‘The Bold Fusilier’

The most significant folksong collector in Australia, John Meredith, who, with Hugh Anderson wrote Folk Songs of Australia and the Men and Women Who Sang Them (Ure Smith, 1967), boldly claimed that:

[Sydney] May and other writers have asserted that the tune is derived from an arrangement of ‘Thou Bonny Woods of Craigielea’, but most people realize that ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is simply a parody on ‘The Bold Fusilier’, which was widely sung in this country during the nineteenth century. Other evidence exists to support the view that Paterson did not actually compose the ballad, but polished up an existing song, one which had already established itself in oral circulation.

‘Craigielea’ lacks even a superficial resemblance to ‘Waltzing Matilda’ as we know it today; one has, however, only to look at the text of ‘The Bold Fusilier’ to see the similarity.

John Meredith collected a performance of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ from Arthur Buchanan in the 1950s (listen to audio). This led to his view that a version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ existed before the Macpherson/Paterson collaboration.

The first manuscripts >

 

 

Kathleen Cooper’s transcription of ‘The Bold Fusilier’

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