Our flagship The Australian National Dictionary informs us that the name ‘Matilda’ for a ‘swag’ is a transfer from the female forename. But why did the swaggies call their swag ‘Matilda’? Why not ‘Jane’ or ‘Jill’ or ‘Jenny’ or ‘Josephine’? One explanation given is that (Once Upon a Time) there was a young and handsome swaggie who fell in love with a girl called ‘Matilda’, the daughter of a squatter. On being approached for her hand, the irate squatter sent the swaggie off with a flea in his ear. But the daughter was moved by the swaggie’s swagger (or whatever) and eloped with him. (Onya, Mattie!) For many years the two of them wandered the bush a-swaggying. At length—and they were both now well advanced in years—the old lady died. The swaggie buried her tenderly beside a tree (Who knows? It may well have been a coolibah). Then he rolled up his swag and said to it, ‘Now it’s only you and me, Matilda me old girl’. Whereupon he humped his newly-named swag and walked away into the sunset. The story of the old man and his Matilda spread rapidly among the bush fraternity and from then on a swag was called a ‘Matilda’ in the old man’s memory.

This sad and affecting story ought to be true if there is any justice in this world. It isn’t. It’s what the Germans call ein Märchen,‘a fairytale’ or, more vulgarly, ‘a load of cock and bull’—as in erzähle mir keine Märchen! (‘Give me none of your cock-and-bull!’ or ‘Pull the other one, mate!’). I haven’t brought this German in gratuitously, by the bye. Our Aussie swaggies’ ‘Matilda’ very likely takes it name from a laid-back Teutonic lass.
 
 

The shift from Mathilde(as human mattress) to Mathilde(as ‘swag’) would have been an easy one to make. Some evidence (admittedly anecdotal) exists that that shift was, indeed, made. H.H. Pearce (pp. 2223) quotes from an interview the editor of the German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt,a Herr Zimmermann, conducted at his request. The interviewee was an old man of seventy-six named Jensen who had been apprenticed to a leather craftsman when he was a youth. At the age of sixteen he had been sent by his Master on a five-year wander. The youth had made tornistersfor his fellow-wanderers, a tornisterbeing ‘a form of knapsack with two shoulder straps for each arm and carried across the shoulders’—very like our Aussie swaggies’ Matilda, in fact. The Teutonic tornisters,however had a salient difference—they were made from pelts (i.e. the fur was still on them): the wandering apprentices wrapped their blankets and other belongings in the tornister(the furry side on the outside) and humped them across their shoulders when they went on their wander. Herr Jensen’s evidence continues:

The simple answer is that neither she nor it did. The German word for ‘waltz’ in the sense ‘a kind of dance’ is Walzer.But there is another word Walz(e)which means ‘a roll’ or ‘cylinder’ of various kinds, from which the verb walzen ‘to rotate’ or ‘roll around’ etc. is formed. In colloquial German the same word was used for ‘roving, tramping’: hence the expression auf die Walze gehen‘to go a-wandering’, ‘to go on one’s travels’ (Brockhaus German Dictionary).The term auf der Walzwas used especially of the wandering apprentices going on their lengthy prescribed walkabouts. The practice of these young journeymen going ‘on the Walz'did not, according to Pearce, cease until circa 1911.

There were mass migrations of Germans to Australia from the 1830s onwards. Many of these, no doubt, were young apprentices of the kind described who, back in the Vaterland, had been auf der Walz,humping their Mathildes(in one sense at least), preparatory to getting their qualification as craftsmen. Our earliest citation for Matilda in the sense ‘a swag’ is 1892: ‘An old stager of a sundowner ... slung ‘Matilda’ off his back, and leant across the rail (Bulletin,Sydney, 9 Apr. 18/2). Our earliest citation for the collocation to waltz Matilda comes from Banjo Patterson in 1893: ‘Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling,/Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me./Waltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag,/Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me’ (A.B. Paterson, Singer of the Bush: Complete Works 1885-1900(1982), p. 254).

It is easy to understand how Aussies confused the German Walz with ‘waltz’. Henry Lawson, I suspect, was guilty of such a confusion when, not knowing how the deuce one could dancewith a swaggish Matilda, he changed waltzing to walking:1893: ‘No bushman thinks of "going on the wallaby" or "walking Matilda", or "padding the hoof"; he goes on the track—when forced to ’t’ (Bulletin,Sydney, 18 Nov. 20/3). In 1898 a writer, faced with the same difficulty of swag-dancing, gave us a delightfully fanciful yarn (mixed metaphors and all) to account for the dancing: ‘The variant Waltzing Matilda... was born from a "tender" swagman’s habit of resting his back by carrying the burden in his arms, when he and it are really suggestive of a lydy [sic] and a gent, embracing in the wrestlers’ hug of a "push" dance-room’ (Bulletin,Sydney, 20 Aug., Red Page).

The following citations are of some significance, given what we have said above. They reveal that over a period of many years Matilda has continued to be most peculiarly personalised: 1898: ‘I was once shocked to see Matilda brutally assaulted by a Murrumbidgee whaler [i.e. a swagman following the course of the Murrumbidgee river]. Stopping at a camping spot he pitched "Billy" aside with a growl; and then took hold of Matilda by her tentacles, swung her high overhead, and banged her on the ground’ (E.S. Sorenson, On the Track,in the Bulletin,Sydney, 30 July 32/2). 1905: ‘As for the writer, well he is married—to Matilda! Like the Old Man of the Sea, she has a tight grip and refuses to be shaken off’ (The Shearer,Sydney, 2 March 8/2). 1905: ‘When I met him he was sauntering up North with his inseparable friend, Lady Matilda’ (The Shearer, Sydney, 2 Sept. 4/1). 1915: ‘But ah! a wintry wind/Awakes Matilda’s charms:/I calmly spread the old girl out/And snuggle in her arms’ (J.P. Bourke, Off the Bluebush,p. 62). 1955: THE SWAGMAN'S FAREWELL TO MATILDA by Jacy Hill: ‘The swagman paused and bared his head beneath the darkened sky;/Then raised Matilda in his arms and breathed a last good-bye./The brand of Cain was on his brow, but anguish in his soul,/As, with a frenzied cry, he cast her in the waterhole./A startled night-bird gave a scream and flapped across his sight—/"Matilda’s ghost!" he gasped, and fled, a madman through the night’ (Douglas Stewart & Nancy Keesing (eds) Australian Bush Ballads,p. 253). 1978: ‘The swagmen, each with his blue blanket tied at either end like a long sausage, his few worldly belongings inside, and carried over his shoulder by a piece of rope, had long lost truck with families and friends. Their "wives" now were the matildas (i.e. swags) they carried around the bush’ (R.A.F. Webb, Brothers in the Sun: a History of the Bush Brotherhood Movement in the Outback of Australia,p. 53).

I cannot say with certainty that the term waltzing Matilda came from the German auf der Walz gehen mit Mathildeor some formulation such. It seems likely.