The song is an account of the memories of an old Australian man who, as a youngster, had travelled across rural Australia as a swagman, "waltzing [his] Matilda" (carrying his "swag", a combination of portable sleeping gear and luggage) all over the bush and the outback.
When the ship carrying the young soldiers had left Australia, the band played "Waltzing Matilda" while crowds waved flags and cheered.
When the crippled narrator returns and "the legless, the armless, the blind, the insane" are carried down the gangway to the same popular music, the people watch in silence and turn their faces away.
Interviewed by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2002, Bogle said that as a 12-year-old boy in Peebles, Scotland in 1956, he had purchased a set of bound volumes of World War Illustrated, a weekly "penny dreadful propaganda sheet", which had been published during World War I. Bogle was inspired by the photography and felt a sense of "...the enormity of the conflict and its individual toll".
[1] A couple of years after arriving in Australia, Bogle found himself at an Anzac Day march in Canberra and the song was the result of that event.
[1] In 1974, Bogle entered the National Folk Festival songwriting competition in Brisbane, which offered a first prize of a $300 Ovation guitar.
She sang it at a festival in the south of England where folk-singer June Tabor heard it and later recorded it for her 1976 debut solo album Airs and Graces.
[1] The line "they gave me a tin hat" is anachronistic, as steel helmets were not issued to British and Empire troops at Gallipoli.
The song refers to the fighting at Suvla Bay in the lines: And how well I remember that terrible day, how our blood stained the sand and the water.
The vast majority of the 16,000 Australian and New Zealand troops landed not at Suvla but at Anzac Cove, 8 kilometres to the south, and some 15 weeks earlier.
[1] Other cover versions of the song have been performed and recorded by The Pogues, Katie Noonan (Flametree Festival Byron Bay 08), The Irish Rovers, Joan Baez, Priscilla Herdman, Liam Clancy, Martin Curtis, The Dubliners, Ronnie Drew, Danny Doyle, Slim Dusty, The Fenians, Mike Harding, Jolie Holland, Seamus Kennedy, Johnny Logan and Friends, John Allan Cameron, John McDermott, Midnight Oil, Christy Moore, William Crighton,[10] The Sands Family, the Skids, John Williamson, The Bushwackers and the bluegrass band Kruger Brothers, Redgum, John Schumann, Tickawinda (on the album Rosemary Lane),[11] Orthodox Celts, The Houghton Weavers, Elizabeth Smith & The Lancers (Australian Army Band), The Pogues and Bread and Roses.
Whilst touring the country, in April 2014, Ward also performed the song to a capacity crowd at The Grand Pavilion in Matlock Bath.
[13] In May 2001 the APRA, as part of its 75th Anniversary celebrations, named "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" as one of the Top 30 Australian songs of all time.