The Last Continent (Terry David John Pratchett) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

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Banjo Patterson’s (see the annotation {48}) best-known work, by some margin, is ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Unfortunately, his words are not the same as those sung to the world-renowned tune. Even more unfortunately, although every Australian knows this song, no two of them seem to agree on all the lyrics, so this version should not be taken as authoritative:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolabah tree,

And he sang as he watched and waited for his billy boil,

‘Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?’

CHORUS:

Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda,

Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me?

And he sang as he watched and waited for the billy boil,

Who’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me?

Down came a jumbuck to drink at the billabong,

Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee,

And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tuckerbag,

‘You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.’

Down came the squatter, a-riding on his thoroughbred,

Down came the troopers, one, two, three.

‘Whose is the jumbuck you’ve got in your tuckerbag?

You’ll come a-waltzing matilda with me.’

Up jumped the swagman and leapt into the billabong,

‘You’ll never take me alive,’ said he,

And his ghost may be heard as you pass beside the billabong,

‘You’ll come a-waltzing matilda with me.’

The astute reader will have noticed that the last sentence of Terry’s paragraph (“And he swore as he hacked and hacked at a can of beer, saying ‘What kind of idiots put beer in tins?’”) fits both the tune and the structure of the song. The expression “waltzing Matilda” existed before the song, meaning to hump or carry one’s belongings with one, like a tramp.