What does Waltzing Matilda mean?

The lyrics of Waltzing Matilda use Australian English bush vocabulary that requires translation for most contemporary listeners. The phrase 'waltzing Matilda' itself does not refer to dancing with a woman but to walking with a swag (a bedroll and bundle of belongings tied across the shoulders). To 'waltz Matilda' is to travel on foot looking for work, with the swag affectionately named Matilda after the German tradition of giving female names to soldiers' coats and cloaks.

The opening scene describes a swagman, a seasonal bush worker moving between sheep stations during the late nineteenth century shearing season. He camps by a billabong, an Aboriginal English word for a still pool of water in a dry riverbed, and boils his billy (a tin pot) of tea over a campfire under the shade of a coolibah tree, a species of eucalyptus that grows along watercourses in inland Australia.

The story turns when a jumbuck (a sheep) wanders down to the water. The swagman catches it and stuffs it into his tucker bag (food bag). The squatter, the wealthy owner of the sheep station, rides up on his thoroughbred horse and accuses the swagman of theft. Three mounted troopers (police officers) arrive to make the arrest. Rather than face transportation or imprisonment, the swagman jumps into the billabong and drowns. The final verse states that his ghost can still be heard singing from the water.

The song has often been read as a sympathetic portrayal of the underdog against authority, in keeping with the 1890s rural unrest and the Great Shearers' Strike of 1891 that may have influenced Banjo Paterson when he wrote the lyrics. The imagery of swagmen, billy tea, and the Australian bush becomes a portrait of a vanished way of working life, and the song's enduring popularity rests partly on that nostalgic picture of nineteenth-century rural Australia.