Waltzing Matilda on the Fourth of July

Using Chatwin's notion of "songlines" as the carriers of cultural memory, this novel of ideas explores American and Australian myths of nationhood through the experience of a fictional Professor of Folklore and his son who visit Sydney during the 1995 centenary of "Waltzing Matilda." Their journey takes them into Australia's remotest Northern frontiers in search of a homeland in which to lay the ashes of a young aboriginal footballer whom they had befriended, and who died in tragic and mysterious circumstances. The ancient landscape draws them into the dreams of its forgotten and exiled people, and confronts them with the restless ghosts of history, whose voices, in song and story, still resist dispossession in all forms. The thesis presents an Aboriginal geography connecting story, land, and people, as a window through which readers might explore a different multiculturalism, grounded in how land claims people, long before people claim the land.