This is a series of posts about the music I play while writing.  This time looking at The Band Played Waltzing Matilda by Eric Bogle about the Australian experience during the WWI Gallipoli campaign where ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) forces suffered heavy losses. Don’t confuse this with the folk song Waltzing Matilda.  Bogle uses Waltzing Matilda for images and metaphors but I’ll get into that later. The style of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda is a folk song accompanied by guitar.  Stylistically it’s a not exactly a ballad, more of a prose poem or short story.  I find the song moving as it gives a realistic feeling of what those soldiers went through and about what can happen to a solider.  Written in 1971 by Eric Bogle, Scottish-born Australian folk singer-songwriter, the song does carry some of the anti-war emotion that was the early 70’s.

This song ends up on my play because, the melody creates a reflective mood, tells a story, and gets me thinking. To fully understand this song you need to know more than what the singer tells us in the song.  You need to know at least two things, history of the Gallipoli campaign and the Australian folk song Waltzing Matilda.  Bogle’s song makes direct references to both.

I should say that this song speaks directly to the ANZAC experience.  Similarly the song Waltzing Matilda is uniquely Australian and most outsiders don’t fully understand it, other than it’s the unofficial National Anthem of Australia.

Waltzing Matilda was written in 1895 by the Australian bush poet Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson.  First thing to point out about the song is that it’s a ballad of a “swagman” or itinerant worker who traveled around Australia and his “Matilda” is his swag bag holding his worldly possessions.  As a child hearing this song, I assumed Matilda was his girlfriend or wife. No, to go “Waltzing Matilda” was to rollup your stuff, ‘Matilda’ and go wandering around looking for work or adventure.  Here’s a good version of Waltzing Matilda:

Here’s translations of Australian words in the song:

billabong – an oxbow lake or watering hole

jumbuck – a sheep

billy – a can to boil water in

tucker bag – food bag

troopers – mounted police

squatter – farmers who raised livestock on land they didn’t have a right to (often these squatters acquired legal rights or ownership ship of the land later).

We could translate the story of the swagman to this: He was camped by a watering hole boiling water when a sheep came down and the swagman grabs it for his dinner.  Then troopers with the farmer came to arrest the swagman for stealing the sheep.  The swagman jumps in the billabong and dies.  His ghost then haunts the billabong.

It should also be noted that in Australia it often gets used on official occasions and by military units.

Next thing to know about is the Gallipoli campaign during World War I.  A quick history refresher here: WWI was fought between the Allied powers of France, Great Britain, Japan and Russia and the Central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.  Italy joined the Allies in 1915 and the USA joined in 1917.  Great Britain meant the British Empire including Australia.  While most think of the trench warfare in France, there were battles in many other parts of the world, including Asia, the Pacific and even in Africa.

The Ottoman Empire is largely modern day Turkey plus other parts of the Middle-east and Greece.  Gallipoli is a peninsula on one side of the Dardanelles Strait which is the main waterway that leads to the then Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, and the Back Sea where Russia had warm water sea ports:

In 1915 the Allies thought that they could weaken the Ottoman Empire by an attack in the Dardanelles and get warships into the Sea of Marmara to shell Constantinople and open a supply route to Russian ports.  The Ottomans were also a threat to the Suez Canal.  First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill, ordered a Naval attack in the Dardanelles in early 1915.  This failed and the Ottomans were able to stop Allied ships with a combination of mines and coastal artillery.

The decision was then made to invade Gallipoli. The idea was to secure the area by land which would allow the fleet to sail to Constantinople.  The amphibious Army landing included both French and British Empire troops.  In total 65,000 troops were ANZAC.

The campaign failed and the Ottomans held their ground.  From the landings on 25 April, 1915 until the withdrawal in 9 January 1916 ANZAC forces suffered about 12,000 dead and 23,000 wounded — a causality rate near 50 percent.  The horror of that battle is hard to describe.

ANZAC Day is now remembered on the 25^th of April to remember Gallipoli and in the decades since that battle has been expanded to commemorate all Australians and New Zealanders who served and died.

Which brings us back to the song by Eric Bogle.  Listen to it here:

The story is simple, a young swagman who had a simple and free life roaming around Australia, is recruited into the army and goes to Gallipoli where his is traumatized in battle and eventually losses his legs in an artillery shell explosion.  Arriving home the soldier is ignored by society and while watching an ANZAC day parade from his front porch, questions the war, ending the song envisioning the ghosts soldiers marching by a billabong like the swagman in Waltzing Matilda.

Bogle’s skill as a poet is another reason why I like this song.  This line also sticks with me, “For I’ll go no more waltzing Matilda.” Here our soldier realizes his loss and we get a glimpse into the melancholy state of his mind.  Every thing he had before the war is now gone and he doesn’t understand why. Bogle has been quoted as saying that he wrote this song as an oblique commentary on the Vietnam war and at first was criticized but later veteran groups started viewing the song as anti-war but not anti-soldier and embraced it.  If you look deeply into the campaign you’ll discover that the failure of the battle and the high casualties is really due to the arrogance and incompetence of various political and military leaders. 

So there you go a long winded reason why this song is on my playlist.