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Origins of Christina Macpherson tune
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The first manuscripts of ‘Waltzing Matilda’There are two known, notated versions of the song and lyrics in the handwriting of Christina Macpherson. These are in two separate but related musical manuscripts: one held at the National Library of Australia, the other owned by the Bartlam-Roulston family in Hobart and held at the Matilda Expo in Kynuna, Queensland. Christina Macpherson’s manuscript in the National Library The musical manuscript held in the National Library of Australia represents Christina’s own embryonic musical notation of the tune she remembered. It is clearly the hand of an amateur musician, more used to playing by ear than writing music. Her composition, therefore, represents a transcription and variant of the ‘Craigie-Lea’ tune, which she notated from memory sometime after she first heard it at a race meeting in Warrnambool, Victoria. It is found in the National Library at MS9065 and includes her transcription of Banjo Paterson’s original words (view image). Some researchers claim this ‘version’ represents a newly composed work, some claim it is an arrangement of an existing song. By Christina’s own account in a letter to Thomas Wood, she and Banjo created the song together, based on the ‘Craigielee’ tune (view image). However, Sydney May, author of the first researched book on the subject, The Story of Waltzing Matilda, asserts that there was no piano at Dagworth Station, only ‘an instrument which played from a perforated roll’ and an autoharp (view image). Banjo Paterson himself later referred to Christina playing a ‘zither’. In a 1930s ABC Radio program, Banjo Paterson said: The shearers staged a strike by way of expressing themselves and Macpherson’s woolshed at Dagworth was burnt down, and a man was picked up dead... Miss Macpherson used to play a little Scottish tune on a zither and I put words to it and called it ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Banjo Paterson almost never referred to the song’s creation until very late in his life. On 16 June 1939, he recalled this event with some inaccuracy in a letter to Laurie Copping, who, as President of the Children’s Book Council, had written to Paterson to enquire about the origins of ‘Waltzing Matilda’:
Christina’s process of transcription of the tune is revealed through analysis of the musical manuscript. Firstly, she roughly sketched the pitches of the tune with the key words, without rhythm (view image). Then she added the notation of the rhythm to the tune, plus the full text. This rhythmic notation in the final copy is musically inaccurate in places, with occasionally an inaccurate number of beats per bar, most notably in the third line, ‘Who’ll come a Waltzing Matilda my darling?’ Moreover, the range is so high in the key and pitch—she has notated the music in E flat major—that it is impossible for any amateur to sing at written pitch (it is best suited to a baritone two octaves below). The musical handwriting and the awkward note-heads in the ledger line (e.g. the range in the third line) reveal someone struggling to correctly notate the music (view image). These qualities of the manuscript all support Christina’s own admission that ‘I am no musician but did my best’. The Bartlam-Roulston manuscript Another manuscript in the hand of Christina Macpherson exists and it was this discovery which changed historical understanding of the origins of the song. It is owned by the Bartlam-Roulston family of Hobart and first came to light in 1971 in a ‘Letter to the Editor’ of The Bulletin, by J.R.Y. Bartlam. Headed ‘Matilda’s First Waltz’, it was published in the issue for 9 October 1971 (view image). Bartlam’s father, W.B. Bartlam, had been the manager of Marathon, the station adjoining Dagworth during the 1880s and 1890s and, as neighbours and friends, the Bartlams inherited this ‘original’ version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ which, the letter claims, was played on the piano at Marathon and sung to the children at bedtime. This manuscript version is now on restricted display as the centerpiece of the Matilda Expo at Kynuna in Queensland. Its facsimile is published in Richard Magoffin’s Fair Dinkum Matilda (Charters Towers, Qld: Mimosa Press, 1973) together with Magoffin’s correspondence with the Bartlam family and his account of its discovery. The two manuscripts are almost identical and are clearly in the same handwriting. The Bartlam-Roulston manuscript is slightly more embryonic in its rhythmic notation (e.g. lack of beams in the opening rising melody ‘Oh there...’, and five crotchet beats in bar 11), leading some authors to believe that this was the first attempt by Christina to notate the song that she and Banjo had composed together. Nevertheless, in the forensically authenticated manuscript provided to the National Library of Australia by Christina’s grand niece Joanna Macrae, the tentative pitch transcription of the tune appears in the same manuscript paper leaf as the final version, and so suggests this manuscript version was either the first, or was Christina’s attempt to remember, at a later date, what she had previously managed to notate. |
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