My fear of Banjo Paterson’s swagman is not merely one of beards and campfires and the inky black of the outback sky
Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images
Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty ImagesWed 31 Oct 2018 04.51 GMTLast modified on Mon 12 Nov 2018 03.50 GMT
Australia is haunted. Its colonial past, its rapacious present, its dissolving future. We spread our ghosts thin over a landscape of blood-flecked bluegums and greed-bleached coral. We carry within us a very particular otherness.
This weirdness first snuck up on me as a child of the 1990s, manifesting in some truly ghoulish spectres masquerading as entertainment: EC, the doll without a face from Lift Off; the Dingle Dangle Scarecrow from Play School; the title sequence of Rage and its perpetual screaming; Alexander Downer in fishnets. These tangled with the looming ghastlies of the past: the pan flute of Picnic at Hanging Rock, the deified dead at Gallipoli, the cheery sing-along of “tan me hide when I’m dead, Fred” (creepy) as sung by Rolf Harris (extra creepy.)
But the story that scared me the most as a kid was something far more foundational to the Australian myth: Walzing Matilda.
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I put it to you that Banjo Paterson’s banger and monster-mash, about an outlaw swagman gone troppo, epitomises the madness that haunts the Australian psyche.
I was a sensitive kid, terrified of the dark, Gremlins, ghosts, and what I perceived as their favourite haunt: the bush. Waltzing Matilda was a dirge that played into the worst of my childhood phobias. “And his ghost may be heard” it hissed. “Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?” it intoned.
I used to feel like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone whenever the song was sung at school assemblies. This bloke nicks two sheep, gets copped and drowns himself without a second thought. Are you people hearing this? How jolly was this swagman, truly? Who gets busted in a dine and bolt, and goes on to pull a Harold Holt? The swagman’s suicidal decisiveness unnerved me even then. The thought of him lingering by this little lake was enough to make me hide behind the couch (same place I hid from the dreaded Dingle Dangle Scarecrow). He was Mulga Bill’s Babadook – when people sang his song I’d burst into tears, I’d hide beneath my mum’s skirt, I’d flee the room.
Once, when driving myself and a van load of relatives through the bush outside Narrogin, Western Australia, my mum got lost and stopped to ask directions. She called out to a willowy old bloke, replete with flowing beard and battered bushman’s hat, chopping wood in the middle distance. He approached the van slowly, gripping the hilt of his axe. My older cousin Brad leant in and whispered, “It’s the jolly swagman.”
In the words of the bard himself: “’Twas just a little harmless joke, a trifle overdone.” Nevertheless I lost it. Dacks were indeed cacked.
But this fear of the swagman was not merely one of beards and campfires and the inky black of the outback sky. I was an only child with a large extended family and a mother who spent her free time caring for the elderly, so a fair chunk of my youth was spent at RSLs, bowls clubs, or crammed in the back of a van full of pensioners. I grew up surrounded by conversations of a mythic Australia that had long passed: one of lean-tos and shearing sheds, wharfie work yarns and wartime jiltings, steer castrations and suicides by drowning. They used phrases like “billy-boil”, they danced waltzes, they banged lagerphones, they recalled the absent dead.
I would look at these old men with leathery faces stretched mask-like over the tawny crags and divots of their tucked away traumas and I would feel afraid and alien. A porcelain skinned sook with a stuffed velociraptor tucked under one arm, their talk of hard yakka, hard fighting and hard drinking never appealed to me. The blokes, the mates, the boys – I would spend my life on the outer, ever dreading their mean turns. It fundamentally affected my understanding of Australia, how I related to it, and what it was to be the “right” kind of bloke.
To watch these men was to watch someone attempt to revive landscapes and people long gone, landscapes that were maybe shop fronts, people that were maybe store mannequins. To look back to an Australia of misplacement, memory and myth.
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In 2018, my fear of a “swagman” is more a fear of being approached by a hypebeast with a Crash Bandicoot neck tattoo offering me a puff of his Xanax flavoured e-cigarette. But the old ghost of the old song lingers. While he has stopped being a shadowy wraith beckoning me to a watery end, he has morphed more fully into a phantom that represents my unease with a homeland still reverberating with colonial violence. It’s our anthem of unbelonging, the tinny jingle that plays over the shoddy PA that is Australia as a haunted house. It’s a foundation myth-cum-identity crisis, one that straddles the toxic and the quixotic, the lark and the dark, the waltz and the suicide. It is at once a lament, a protest, a piss-take and a threat.
This Halloween, stop and listen for the swagman’s ghost. It may be heard beneath the cries of refugee children, the PM speaking in tongues and looping SportsBet ads. Will you take this waltz?