"History" is supposed to be constructed from documentation of "facts", while song is a form of "oral history"; both are constructed according to the author's agenda. Sometimes the facts are "correct" and sometimes the author's agenda is neutral and benign but, always, the most useful question to ask of any representation (especially the more successful ones) is "Who benefits?"

One of the current heavies involved with the Greenwich Museum wrote his PhD thesis on the involvement of Australians in the Gallipoli theatre in WWI and subsequently edited "The diaries of C.E.W. Bean"; Bean was the official Australian War Correspondent at the time. When the thesis writer was, subsequently, setting exam questions for his history students at Monash Uni, one favourite was to print out the text of Eric Bogle's "The band played Waltzing Matilda" and invite the candidates to enumerate (with justification) the errors in the text.

Bean certainly had an agenda but there was a lot of other material (some corroborating and some contradicting him) in the Australian War Memorial. A PhD thesis, by definition, has an agenda but it's usually to be "neutral and objective" in reassessing received wisdom. Given that he wrote the song while living near the Enoggera Barracks around the time Australia was extricating itself from Vietnam and when Alan Seymour's Anzac Day play, "The One Day of the Year" (1960) was a hot topic of dissension, I'm confident that Eric's main agenda was to highlight the wastefulness of war and produce a singable song that got the emotional and social effects "right".

Which he did. Incidentally, it scored second prize in the 1974 National Folk Festival's Song Contest; nobody now recalls the song that came first.

Cheers, Rowan