Myth, legend and the other stuff of history

Waltzing Matilda was invented by a man called Paterson, selfnamed “Banjo”, in 1895. Banjo Paterson was no swagman. He was no bushman either, having left his family’s farm for Sydney Grammar School when he was ten. He was a city-based lawyer and a sometime poet who published in the ardently nationalistic Bulletin, and he did a great deal to create the myth of the tough men created by the tough Australian bush. He wrote Matilda four years after the bitter shearers’ strike. Squatters were not popular then, or not among the readers of the Bulletin. Paterson constructed his swagman saga out of the hard politics of the early 1890s.

Nowadays we take Waltzing Matilda easily, enjoying its extravagances along with our mild contempt for outsiders who don’t know what “jumbuck” and “billabong” and “waltzing Matilda” mean. We like the tune. We like the sentiment, too, however fast it is eroding.

That might be why we like it - because it is a relic from a remote past. Or is it important to us not because it is a fragment of history, but because it is not: an invented moment masquerading as an icon of a fictional all-white past?

Nowadays the bush myth is alive and serving present purposes well, although now the squatter has the central role, as when The Men from Snowy River clatter up Collins Street in their R.M. Williams outfits in defence of their inalienable right to graze their cattle on public land, or the Prime Minster dons his Akubra, Pastoralist Style, to signify his solid worth. Meanwhile the billabong swagman has become an innocuous icon of feckless freedom. But the resonances of the idea remain specific to us.

Here I have tried to show how the root-system of an invented but vital myth can bind a person to the nation and to the national culture, while remaining sufficiently flexible to allow any number of individual emphases and uses, including cynical ones. A successful myth only grows more potent with exploitation.

Down at the beachfront there is a shop selling mainly to tourists and backpackers. Yesterday a toy was on special display: a koala wearing a leather waistcoat and a slouch hat, waving a bunch of green plastic gum leaves. If you poked a button hidden under his waistcoat, his stomach would croak a verse of Waltzing Matilda. The shopkeeper misread my interest and said, “Awful, isn’t it? Made in China!” It was both awful and made in China. But I still wanted it.

Waltzing Matilda has become a durable myth, commanding general recognition and affection yet remaining sufficiently capacious to contain a jumble of personal associations. Its expansiveness is the problem.

Mr Howard’s ambition is to extend the scope of the values he sees as common to old Australia to embrace newcomers. He specifies these common values as “respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, a commitment to the rule of law, the equality of men and women and a spirit of egalitarianism that embraces tolerance, fair play and compassion for those in need”.

Waltzing Matilda meets some of these criteria, but on others it spectacularly fails. Why does he want these values shared? Because “a sense of shared values is our social cement. Without it we risk becoming a society governed by coercion rather than consent.”

I think he is right about that, too. But perhaps what Mr Howard needs is not history, which resists simplification, but legends: “traditional stories popularly regarded as historical”, like the stories and values which cluster so thickly around Anzac Day.