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RATCATCHER – PAST SIMULATIONS
[WALTZING MATILDA, SPRING 2013]
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"Change begins from the moment you muster the courage to act."
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--Daisaku Ikeda
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
WALTZING MATILDA
Spring 2013
Waltzing Matilda proved to be groundbreaking in a number of ways, including the fact that it (with the possible exception of Original G ) was the simulation that most used "real" sociohistorically specific details. The simulation is based on the circumstances surrounding the composition of Australia's most famous song. Waltzing Matilda recounts the tale of a hapless swagman (wandering itinerant laborer, essentially a hobo) who steals a sheep from a squatter (an outsider European who claimed land to which he had no legal title, largely by virtue simply of being the only European in the area). To avoid capture, and probably execution, the "swaggie" chooses to commit suicide by jumping into a billabong (an isolated pond left behind after a river changes course).
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Besides being incredibly memorable and "singable," Waltzing Matilda is said by many to reflect the true spirit of the Australian Outback of the 1890s, which elevated individualism, freedom from restraint, a certain lawlessness, and refusal to conform.
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But another interpretation of the song holds that it is more than a catchy ditty, but a multiplex cultural metaphor commenting on a unionist who was killed in an actual labor strike, considered an important part of an historical period that proved to be a turning point in world labor history.
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The class did a superb job of judging the merits of these interpretations, as well as coming up with some additional alternatives, one of the most astounding of which involved an ancient Aboriginal songline that poses a riddle that turns out to be a hoax critically commenting on the pretensions of those who let greed overrun their better natures.
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Another, extraordinarily successful, feature that debuted with the Waltzing Matilda simulation was that the class split into three teams that reflected their divisions in the simulation performance and wrote three scholarly papers analyzing the simulation process from three different perspectives prominent in the literature on experiential learning. I am of course looking forward to taking all these lessons into the next iteration of the course, Spring 2014's My Family's Always Been in Whiskey.
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Fun Facts and Trivia
-- Unlike nearly all previous simulations, Waltzing Matilda featured several actual figures prominent in the simulation history, including A. B. "Banjo" Paterson (played by Jacob Johnson); Christina MacPherson (played by Mary Diamond); and Harry Harbord ("Breaker") Morant (played by Andrew Tri).
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-- One of the most intriguing trajectories emerging as the simulation solution developed concerned a songline (a songline, also called a "dreaming track" by indigenous Australians, represents one of the paths across the land [or sometimes the sky] which mark the route followed by localized "creator-beings" during an ancient period known as "the Dreaming"), here propounded as a form of organizational com-munication by characters portraying Aboriginal peoples (in fact, two other characters also claimed partial Aboriginal ancestry).
The songline was composed by local professional musician Tony Gilkerson, who is rather better known for his electric bass work in his heavy metal band, and performed by him on acoustic guitar.
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