Australia has a strange cottage industry: Arguing about who wrote their unofficial national song, "Waltzing Matilda."

The official party line is that the words are by the famous author A. B. Paterson, known as "Banjo" (a pseudonym he took from a racehorse, not the musical instrument; I've read that Paterson was so unmusical as to be tone-deaf, and certainly he was mostly a poet, not a songwriter). The music is said to have been set by Christina MacPherson, a member of the family that owned Dagworth, the sheep station Banjo was visiting in 1895 when he wrote his text.

There are a few iconoclasts who doubt this story. Some doubt it just because they're doubters. A few claimed to have known people who sang "Waltzing Matilda" before 1895. Others have a much better reason: A song known as "The Bold Fusilier," which has the same (unusual) stanza form as "Waltzing Matilda," and has been sung to a similar tune, and which has an internal reference to the Duke of Marlborough -- which would make it almost certain that the song is from the early 1700s. So if "The Bold Fusilier" and "Waltzing Matilda" are so close that they must be interdependent, and "Waltzing Matilda" was allegedly written in 1895, and "The Bold Fusilier" is from around 1710, which is the source of the other? Sounds pretty obvious when you put it that way, doesn't it?

In fact the question is a lot more complicated, because while the common tune of "Waltzing Matilda" is basically "The Bold Fusilier," the tune Christina MacPherson took down is not quite the same (and, as transcribed, is unsingable). It was a woman named Marie Cowan who, in 1903, published a text (not quite Paterson's) and a tune (not quite MacPherson's) that gave us the modern standard.

Most Australians seem to react instinctively and viscerally to the idea that "their" song is not entirely "theirs." This is perhaps not strange -- a lot of Americans are bothered by the fact that "The Star-Spangled Banner" is sung to the tune of the British drinking song "To Anacreon in Heaven"; it's just that, in the American case, the facts are incontrovertible. In Australia, there is definitely no smoking gun of literary dependence. And so most Australians just accept Paterson's authorship, and usually accept MacPherson's role (although perhaps with less vehemence), and if they build any folklore into the story, it's that Paterson had an affair with MacPherson (there is some evidence for this, but it's weak).

Collectively, I find these impassioned arguments unimpressive. Oh, I don't have much doubt that Paterson really did write the words to "Waltzing Matilda," probably picking up a few local phrases along the way (e.g. "waltzing one's matilda" seems to have been Queensland jargon of what the rest of Australia would have called "being on the swag," which might explain those people who thought they heard the song before 1895). I don't doubt that MacPherson gave Paterson a tune -- we have a manuscript of the tune in her handwriting. I do somewhat doubt that the tune is "Thou Bonnie Woods of Craigielea," which is what many historians claim; there is reason to think MacPherson once heard a march arrangement of this tune, but would she really have remembered it a year later? She didn't remember the name of her tune, after all. So why couldn't she have remembered "The Bold Fusilier" instead?

On those issues, you have the right to form your own conclusions. We'll never be entirely sure; too much data has been lost. But I am bothered by the way most recent books on the issue have been written. They are out to prove that Paterson wrote the words, and that Macpherson gave him the music from "Craigielea," and that's that.

This book is different. It concludes of course that Paterson wrote the words, and that MacPherson supplied a tune -- but it takes "The Bold Fusilier" seriously, and looks at both sides of the question. Richardson's suggestion is that Marie Cowan conformed MacPherson's tune to "The Bold Fusilier." I'm not sure I buy that idea either, but it makes more sense than any of the other suggestions (that "The Bold Fusilier" is a fake, or was written after "Waltzing Matilda," or that British soldiers had somehow preserved it for two centuries without a tune and then set it to "Waltzing Matilda" during the Boer War). And Richardson gives you a chance to think about it for yourself. Of the books I've read about "Waltzing Matilda" (and I've read three, plus some shorter articles), this is the best by at least as far as a swagman could walk in a day. ( )