Memories
and Meaning
“Once
a jolly swagman camped beside a billabong
Under
the shade of a coolibah tree.
He
sang as he watched and waited ‘til his billy boiled,
You’ll
come a waltzing Matilda with me.”
Banjo
Patterson (c.1895)
For
unknown reasons, I woke this morning with this song playing in my head. I
learned it during school assembly in the auditorium at Normal Park Elementary
in Chattanooga. I couldn’t have been more than seven, and had absolutely no idea
what it meant, but I learned the words and loved to sing it. The song actually
arose out of the Australian depression of the 1890’s when many people became
homeless and trekked (waltzed) around the country looking for work. The song is
about a poor man, what we would call now, a beggar or a homeless person, who
camps beside a creek (billabong) and makes himself a cup of tea. While he waits
for the water to boil, a sheep comes to drink in the creek. The beggar seizes
the sheep and stuffs it into his “Matilda” (rucksack). In other words, he steals
the sheep because he is hungry. Later in the song, a “squatter” (the local authority)
on horseback comes upon the “swagman” (vagabond) and demands the sheep’s return.
Whereupon he jumps up and runs away rather than go to jail, so he is shot and
killed. The last stanza of the song says that when people pass beside that
billabong, his ghost can be heard singing “you’ll come a waltzing Matilda with
me.”
So,
this little jingle that I learned in grammar school was, in fact, a protest
song about poverty and the lack of compassion on the part of authorities for
the needs of the poor. Was the sheep more valuable than the migrant farm worker? As a young woman, I taught children of the farm workers in California in the 1960’s. They were hardly
there for more than a few months, and they lagged far behind other children in
their basic skills, not because there was anything wrong with them
intellectually, but because their lives had no stability. I remember the
stories my grandmother told about our own great depression. My father’s family
lost everything; their home, and their business, and moved into and operated a
boarding house for other people who had lost everything. She told of hobos
(swagmen) coming to the kitchen door to beg for food, which she always
provided, even if it was only a biscuit. There has always been a spirit of
generosity in America, especially when hard times hit all of us (like now).
I like
to think that spirit of compassion is still alive and well. It is the
archetypal feminine spirit that is so needed in our time—the one that provides
wisdom, nurturing, empathy, and, yes, joy. It is the spirit that reaches out
and offers a hand to anyone who needs it. Brene Brown describes it as the
recognition that we are all connected by something greater than ourselves, and
that "something" is grounded in love and compassion. Whether we are male of
female, we can embody the feminine spirit that is our universal connection to
one another and to the world’s soul. If we want a kinder, gentler world, that
is how we achieve it.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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