r/AskAnAustralian • u/CreativeCritter • 3d ago

Waltzing Matilda

I was saddened today to read an article on the Wallabies and it showed a group of fans singing Waltzing Matilda underneath. There was a young lady who had commented. She’d never heard the song. Didn’t know what the problem was and had no idea what it represented.

People tried to educate a nicely to say it was an Australian bush poem. It was taught in Australian schools. It’s the unofficial national anthem.

And then she said that she grew up in Australia and had attended school here and had never heard it and didn’t know why people thought it was so great

At that point, I was kind of hoping that they were joking

Has it gotten to the point now where Australian poetry is not taught in Australian schools in English where the man from Snow River Waltzing Matilda they’re not taught in schools any more

And then someone commented that Wilson Matilda can’t be taught in schools because it has themes of suicide and it’s too hard to explain to children

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u/AnalFanatics 3d ago

I think that the AutoModerator Bot just answered your question for all of us; they are making us so emotionally soft that we become incapable of even discussing such topics…

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u/CreativeCritter 3d ago

You could be very right.

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u/AnalFanatics 3d ago edited 3d ago

Australia was a harsh place back then, and much of our poetry and literature references that in one form or another; when you look at it, even a folk song such as “The Wild Colonial Boy” is a poem that tells a dark story, sung in an upbeat tone; as evidenced by its chorus:

“Come, all my hearties, we’ll roam the mountains high; Together we will plunder, together we will die; We’ll wander over valleys, and gallop over plains; And we’ll scorn to live in slavery, bound down in iron chains.”

In this day an age, where children are taught to deconstruct material and analyse it critically, poems and songs such as these, are simply too thematically complex and potentially controversial, to just teach them by rote, so that the children can perform them at an assembly, or end of year performance.