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Who'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me? Swagies
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Film and Television

Versions and references to the song in film and television abound. The earliest in the collection of ScreenSound Australia: the National Screen and Sound Archive is the 1933 film Waltzing Matilda. This was directed by the most important early Australian film director, Raymond Longford, famous for his silent film, The Sentimental Bloke.

The plot reads:

Wrongly believing that they have injured a policeman in a drunken fight, Chic Williams and his friend James Brown evade a private detective who is following them, and set off for the bush. In fact, the detective only wants to inform James that he has inherited a fortune. Chic and James find work at Banjaroo Station as drovers and James falls in love with the station owners daughter. When the detective arrives and tells James of his good fortune, the young lovers announce their engagement, and Chic sets off alone again, with his swag on his back.

Much later, in the film A Year to Remember (1948), Chico Marx entertained a group of soldiers from a military college by singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’. A 1949 documentary film by director Jack Keane tells the story of the hard life of a swagman, and a 1960 film by Don Featherstone recounts the tale of Matilda, set in the Australian bush, to the soundtrack of the song.

Animators have used the ‘Waltzing Matilda’ song and imagery as the basis for political satire; for example a Peter Nicholson piece about the sacking of then Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, in 1975. Richard Franklin’s 1973 film And the Ghost May Be Heard reappraised ‘Waltzing Matilda’. It depicted the jolly swagman, displaced from his billabong by a bulldozer, wandering into Melbourne where he is bewildered by freeway construction and other signs of modernity.

Numerous films incorporate ‘Waltzing Matilda’ into their soundtracks as a traditional Australian song. Newsreel items up to the 1960s regularly used the song as the soundtrack, especially where reference was made to the Australia’s armed forces, or, in the case of a 1960 newsreel, the Citizen Military Forces. Movietone News in 1940 announced the arrival of the Halifax Bomber called Waltzing Matilda at Mascot airport in Sydney. CineSound Review in 1953 reported on the Australian troops landing in Korea during the Korean War. The commentary links these soldiers to the ‘digger’ tradition:

The Aussies sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’ through two World Wars. They’ll sing it again as they march through Korea, and anywhere else they go to punch home the lesson, aggression does not pay.

Depicting the steamer Arcadia departing Australian shores with the Governor-General Sir William Slim on board, the 1960 Australia Day radio broadcast cut in with the tunes ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Road to Gundagai’.

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Eric & Ella Willton talking

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