Why Matilda?

[pmccarthy]

With all this news about Matildas, I am prompted to tell the story of why the Matildas got their name. Obviously, from Waltzing Matilda. But where did that name come from?

 

I researched the subject years ago and found out, but no-one seems to care. I have seen all sorts of silly suggestions about the name. I sent my research to several places including the Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton but have never had a reply.

 

If anyone is interested I will post it here.

 

 

[nomadpete]

I am a curious person.

 

(So I have been told)

 

Please post the story

[Jerry_Atrick]

Yes - pls do

[pmccarthy]

One request is enough! 

 

Various researchers have suggested that swagmen danced with their swags which they named Matilda, and that the name came with German immigrants. There is a connection with the German “äuf der walz” which meant tramping for work in Europe.

 

Matilda first appeared in a comic poem by the American Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903). Leland wrote many comic poems in a fake German style, intending them to be recited and pronounced in the way he had written them. They were very popular in America and equally so when published in Australia at a time when campfire recitation was a popular entertainment in the bush.

 

His poem Hans Breitmann’s Barty was published in The Australasian on 6th February 1869 and was quickly picked up by other papers around Australia. The second verse read:

 

Hans Breitmann gife a barty,
I vent dere you'll pe pound;
I valtzet mit Matilda Yane,
Und vent shpinnen' round und round.
De pootiest Fraulein in de house,
She vayed 'pout dwo hoondred pound,
Und efery dime she gife a shoomp
She make de vindows sound.

 

So - he waltzed with Matilda Jane, went spinning round and round, the prettiest Fraulein in the house, she weighed about two hundred pound, and every time she gave a jump, she made the windows sound.

 

The Melbourne Argus (3^rd April 1869) commented “… the ballads of Hans Breitmann have sprung into popularity at a bound…Only a few copies … having reached the colony, and the demand for them being general, Sir George Robertson has reprinted them.” It is easy to picture a group of swagmen, having heard the recitation, rising beside their morning fire, lifting up a heavy swag and saying “Oh well, time to waltz Matilda again!”

 

The Hans Breitmann poems continued to be popular in Australia for many years, particularly for bush recitations.

 

The first written use of the term “waltz Matilda” appears in a letter by Thomas Greenway published in the South Australian Register on 16 November 1891. Banjo Patterson wrote his poem Waltzing Matilda at Dagworth homestead in January 1895. Then on February 2^nd 1895 the Melbourne Leader published a piece in which “…he supplied me with another way of expressing the action known as carrying the swag; one is so grateful for anything new that even new slang comes not amiss. "Waltzing Matilda" is the phrase. Says my correspondent, “I waltzed Matilda, with a lot of groceries rolled in the blessed thing, from Perth to Marble Bar over drearier country than the Israelites over met in their 40 years of wilderness touring."

 

It is clear that the term waltzing Matilda was circulating in the bush community for some time before Patterson made it so popular.

[onetrack]

The Matilda name is of German-Australian origin, with the name Mathilde used from the eleventh century to denote a prostitute who followed soldiers or apprentices around.

 

The unsupported women of the era knew that soldiers and apprentices at least had some income, so they were at least guaranteed a feed and protection, if not a direct payment for services rendered.

 

Apprentices in Germany had to travel around the countryside getting further advice and instruction from known leading "journeymen", before they were issued with journeymans trade certificates by the person they were apprenticed to.

 

Itinerant Australian workers, who didn’t have a woman to provide warmth and comfort at night, turned instead to their swags – literally, humping bluey.

 

It seems pretty obvious the term "Waltzing Matilda" had been in use for many years, before Banjo Patterson put it into his writings.

[nomadpete]

Thank you both.

[Jerry_Atrick]

Indeed, thanks to both of you...

 

Ironically, the Australian women's soccer give them a name linked with 11th c. German prostitutes; a large fictional German woman, or swags that are humped by the swaggies!

 

 

[nomadpete]

The name giver was no fact checker.

[facthunter]

I think humping your swag means carrying it with you. It contains all your belongings.  Nev

[onetrack]

The meaning of the word "humping" changed dramatically between the 1860's and the 1960's, Nev.

[willedoo]

Swags are a great invention if you have a reasonable one. No matter where you go or whatever you do, you always have a bed. You can stick it the boot of a car, in the back of a Toyota or truck or cart it in an aeroplane. I remember one cook who was sitting in the back of a 206 that kept conking out, and he packed all the swags around himself expecting a crash. Probably a good idea, but it didn't crash anyway. It made it to the airstrip and conked out one last time on the tarmac and had to be towed from there back to the hangar.

 

Most of my time in swags involved rolling it out on one of those wire fold-up shearers cots, basically out of reach of some crawly things. I never liked sleeping on the ground much. Apart from snakes, scorpions can be a nuisance. They are attracted to fireplaces for some reason (warmth or light?) and when sleeping near the fire you can see them walking past on their way to commit suicide in the fire. Luckily, they don't tend to crawl inside swags, but they like to crawl underneath them and camp there for the night. The problem with that is you can get bitten in the morning when you roll the swag up if you're not careful. I've only ever been bitten once, and that was in the morning rolling the swag. It was in black soil crab hole country, a bad place to camp. Those crab holes are full of all sorts of critters.

 

Tips for sleeping on the ground: avoid crab hole country if possible. If arriving at the site at night, get a good torch and check for prickles. Been caught out there before; arriving late at night, we rolled the swags out on the ground and then found out we were in a sea of bogan flea. Last tip, always shape a hollow in the ground around the area of your hips otherwise it's like sleeping on a plank of wood. At my age and state of arthritis, I have no desire to ever sleep in a swag again. I could get into one but they'd need a forklift to stand me up again.

 

Then and now; the swag has gone from a simple bedroll to a $500 mini tent.

 

[willedoo]

Centipedes are the same; they love to burrow under swags.

[willedoo]

I can only just remember the sight of proper swaggies on the road. It was in the early 60's and there wouldn't have been many left by then. In the area where I lived as a kid, we had a couple of retired swaggies who had stopped travelling and built a permanent camp near the local rubbish dump. It was an easy walk to town and the dump was a source of good scrounging. Their names were Santa and Sid. Santa obviously because he had the big white swaggie beard. His mate Sid wasn't the full quid and Santa used to look after him. It's possible they were making a side income from scrounging scrap metal from the dump, but I don't remember that part of it. Santa used to make slingshots for all the kids in the district, made out of a forked stick and a piece of elastic tyre tube.

 

Eventually they hadn't been in town for quite some time, so the local policeman went out to check on them. He found Santa deceased in his bed, obviously for a long time, and Sid was in a bad way because he relied on his mate Santa for almost everything. The government people took Sid away to an institution. How times have changed. In those days, it was live and let live. Those two blokes couldn't get away with living like that in the public eye nowdays. They'd be moved on or arrested, and social workers would dictate their life. Back then, they weren't harming anyone, so were just left alone. I guess another factor is that back then, swaggies were very much recent history and had a certain amount of respect given to them. A lot of the older swaggies in the 50's and early 60's would have been WW1 veterans. It's quite possible Sid And Santa were, and Sid was permanently shellshocked causing him to be the way he was.

[facthunter]

Really got going in the depression. 29- WW2 and a few years after when we had green coupons etc. You couldn't get petrol during the war. A lot of cars went on blocks or used charcoal burners.  Nev

[onetrack]

Both petrol and tyres were still rationed up until around 1949. Motorists struggled to get new tyres after the War, they were like gold. But petrol rationing was kept up to try and save US$ expenditure after the War.

However, the continuing imposition of petrol rationing in the late 1940's was the catalyst that saw Menzies elected. People wanted fuel for travel and work, and wouldn't put up with Wartime rationing any more.

I think the main problem was the Labor Govt of the day was being too tight-fisted and wouldn't consider any major level of budget deficit.

But the silly part was, the Govt was doing well with massive income from War Surplus sales, a recovery in civilian production, and in general development, expansions and improvements, especially in farming regions. 

 

https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/social-affairs/issues-swung-elections-petrol-shortages-and-dawn-menzies-era

 

https://www.robertmenziesinstitute.org.au/on-this-day/the-end-of-petrol-rationing

 

Edited August 19, 2023 by onetrack

[facthunter]

A tyre for a Chev was 9 Quid. About a weeks wages and blasted about 20,000 miles. Fuel was one shilling and ninepence a gallon.   Nev

[facthunter]

Lasted not Blasted.   FAT finger issue.  Nev

[willedoo]

1 minute ago, facthunter said:

Lasted not Blasted.   FAT finger issue.  Nev

The blast is when it blows out.

[old man emu]

20 hours ago, onetrack said:

I think the main problem was the Labor Govt of the day was being too tight-fisted and wouldn't consider any major level of budget deficit.

For a government to go into a budget deficit, it has to arrange things so that debt is greater than income. They do that by borrowing the money from other countries. There has to be money available to borrow. Immediately after WWII most countries that Australia would normally turn to for borrowings were themselves in debt up to their necks. Also, the end of the war also ended the high levels of manufacturing in Australia that it had reached during the war. With the shutdown of manufacturing, individual family incomes, recently boosted by women in the workforce, fell. 

 

The winner really was the agricultural sector, which simply kept doing what it had always done, but found itself in a situation where the demand for its products skyrocketed. Those were the days of wool at a "pound per pound", and production costs were much the same as in pre-war times.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Quite right OME. You could apparently swap a bale of wool for a new car!  Now you have to pay more for it to be shorn that you can sell it for.

But things are a lot better than twenty years ago, with the price of meat quite good.

There is a story of a farmer at Bordertown who shot himself after being offered 20 cents for each of his sheep.

[Bruce Tuncks]

AND, try as I might, I don't understand government finances. What harm does it do to print more than you tax as long as you don't set off inflation?

Edited August 19, 2023 by Bruce Tuncks

[old man emu]

3 hours ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

What harm does it do to print more than you tax as long as you don't set off inflation?

You have to understand the reason why coinage, and later printed notes and other documents, were invented. Coinage is a convenient way to enact a trade. Say you are a grain miller, and I am a poultry farmer. You have flour and I have eggs. You determine a value for a measure of flour, and I determine a value for an egg. We come together to trade, and so we spend time haggling until we reach a compromise as to how much of your flour is as valuable as a a number of my eggs. We exchange and both are satisfied. But in this transaction we both had to bring our items to the point of sale. With coinage, you can determine the number of coins that is as valuable as your measure of flour, and I determine the same for an egg. 

 

While you and I are busy producing our items, your wife comes to my place with coins and asks my wife for a number of eggs. She gives my wife the required number of coins and gets the eggs she wants. Then my wife decides to go to the butcher for a joint (of meat, you Hippy bugger) and uses the coins your wife has given for the eggs to buy the meat. In the village, we have set a value that is represented by one coin.

 

We still use this concept, which relies on an accepted value for each unit of currency. If more and more coins/notes are printed, then the intrinsic value of each unit of currency reduces. You need to accumulate more coins to buy today what you bought last year. That's inflation. The value, in terms of what it can buy, of the coin has been reduced, but we still set prices using the name of the coin. Three litres of milk a couple of years ago was $3.00. Now it is $4.50 (or more). The amount of nutrients in the container has not changed. It is the number of dollars needed to trade for it that has.

 

So, if a government mints more coinage, or prints more notes, the intrinsic value represented by the coin/note's denomination decreases, inflating the price of what you want to buy.

[onetrack]

The inflation the U.S. is currently trying to rein in, was caused by the massive amount of money printing ("monetary stimulus", or in their cute and obtuse wording, "Quantative Easing") that their Federal Reserve carried out a few years ago, without any asset backing increase. All that extra printed money simply went into inflating asset prices, such as property and shares.

Share prices don't often reflect what a company is actually earning, they're quite often just a gambling-style purchase by people with money to burn.

Most share dealers make their money by wheeling and dealing in shares, playing with price rises and falls - not by relying on dividend payouts.

[Jerry_Atrick]

We are going off-topic here, but the US has largely reined in its inflation - currently around 3.2%, but yes, quantitative easing was required at the time, but left too much on for too long - inflation was edging up before the pandemic and the war in Ukaine. With shares, there are two types on investors - those that look at the fundamentals and try and predict the future worth of the company, which is said to be the determinative factor of sustained share price (i.e. outside very short term volatility of the price). So, for example, after the GFC, the banks had consistently lower valuations than they did previously as the outlook over the 5 - 10 year horizon was pretty crap. But, Tesla had great valuations (share price, or share price * issued shares = market capitalisation) as there was a great expectation it would hit massive profits.

 

The other investor is the one who uses "technical" analysis. These are basically algorithms that use a variety of inputs to try and pick the near term volatility (changes in price in this case) in response to those inputs. The Japanese invented candlestick charts are one of them; but they use all sorts of clever maths, augmented with searching certain news feeds and the like, This is more the realm of algorthimic trading where one is trying to make short term profits of market behaviour, rather than long term profits from investing for economic development.

 

Warren Buffet is a fundamentals investor (of a particular type called value investing). They buy to hold; An Algo fund such as these https://www.investmentmarkets.com.au/listings/aim-precision-capital-global-quant-fund-aim-precision-capital-management-649001d1b4fe570014343015  are designed to work off short term volatility.   (note, I have no idea how ggood or bad this fund is.. I just picked it as an example off the internet).

 

[willedoo]

1 hour ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

We are going off-topic here

Maybe not. If all this fancy economic stuff goes pear shaped, we'll all be looking for a nice warm swag to sleep in.