Home to sheep and cattle stations larger than many European principalities, the state’s cattle ranchers and wheat farmers were desperate for labor. Maritime unions tied up Australia’s docks for five months in 1890, miners’ unions cut production at Broken Hill for six months in 1892, and shearers’ unions renewed their prolonged strikes in 1893.
For travelers equally desperate for paid work, rural Queensland offered a lifeline. Getting there meant a three-day train journey from Sydney. Once they landed in Brisbane, the state capital, the hopefuls were faced with a trek, on foot, to the cities where they could sign up for the Roll Call for station workers.
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Throughout this vast territory, twice the size of Texas, rural towns were few, with many hot and dusty miles between them. Because of this, the men had to carry their own supplies of food and water in a duffel bag that they slung on their sweaty backs. In Australia, the tarpaulin and blanket arrangement, wrapped around the traveler’s provisions, earned the nickname ‘swag’, giving its wearer the name ‘swaggie’.
As union bodies increased pressure on governments to introduce social reforms, activists used terror tactics against big landowners. Union militants on horseback rescued Bush workers on the roads and forced them into rebel camps. Thousands of barbed wire fences were destroyed. Forage paddocks were destroyed by fires started with kerosene. Wool sheds burned with the season’s packed wool inside.
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The body of a union shearer named Samuel Hoffmeister was found shot dead with his own revolver, next to a watering hole, or ‘billabong’, near the central Queensland town of Winton.
It was a dangerous time to be riding the country lanes.
For reasons forgotten to history, the practice of wandering country lanes in close company with nothing more than the bundle on a braggart’s back became known as “Matilda Waltzing”. It is also the title of Australia’s unofficial anthem.
The song’s lyrics were written by poet and journalist AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson, who visited rebel camps and wrote first-hand accounts for readers of Sydney’s major newspapers. A close friend of one of the largest landowners in the region, Paterson understood both sides of the argument and is credited with helping to convince both sides in the struggle (landowners and union leaders) to come together and come to a peaceful end to the hostilities. .
- In 1894, the three-year conflict known to historians as “The Shearers’ War” finally came to an end.
In 1938, Paterson wrote, wryly, of his delighted surprise to learn that there “really was” a man from Snowy River. Dozens vindicated themselves or a relative as The Man the poet had invented. Later, he was granted a similar compliment to the now famous swagman of his. From the time of settlement, the only record of fatal drowning was at Combo Waterhole, where George Hamlyn Pope, a wool scourer, drowned after a night of heavy drinking, in September 1891.
Still the legend grew…
In the early 1990s, a group of candid tourists from Marine City, Michigan, USA, was filmed for television Shearer War.
Here, their tour guide told them, was the very place where the poor braggart had drowned. Then, with some ceremony and a lot of goodwill, they put up a bronze plaque in his memory and sang a chorus of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.