The vivid Red Cross markings along its white hull shone brightly under powerful lights as the vessel headed north along the coast in the quiet, still darkness.

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Then two Japanese torpedoes blew holes in its side.

Thirty-year-old nursing sister Lieutenant Ellen Savage was asleep in her bunk when the 96m vessel began to fold in around her. She was sucked down into a whirlpool of flying wood and metal that killed her friends. Her ribs, nose and palate were broken, her eardrums perforated. Bruised all over, she surfaced in the middle of an oil slick and somehow found her way to a raft. She was the only one of 12 nurses on board to survive.

Seaman Matty Morris clung to his raft alongside the dying Private Jack Walder, whose scorched flesh stuck to Morris’s arm.

Over the next 34 hours, as bull sharks circled, Morris encouraged all the other survivors to sing a popular tune together, in the hopes it would keep their flagging spirits alive.

Battered and bedraggled, they sang for hours, bobbing about in the ocean, until the crew on an Avro Anson, flying patrol at about 300m, caught sight of them and came to the rescue.

Of the 322 people on board the Centaur, only 64 survived. The song that kept their spirits alive was Banjo Paterson’s Waltzing Matilda.

This month at the $23 million Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton they are celebrating the 125th anniversary of Paterson’s enduring tune, which in 1974, finished second to Advance Australia Fair in a poll to choose a new national anthem – not bad for a song about a hobo who kills himself after stealing a sheep.

The nearby North Gregory Hotel has long claimed that the song was performed publicly there for the first time on April 6, 1895, Winton’s official Waltzing Matilda Day.

But no matter that both dates are out whack or that the origins of Paterson’s enduring classic are shrouded in mystery – the song, written on a remote property in central Queensland in the 19th century remains, in the 21st, a symbol of Australia’s defiance against oppression.

Waltzing Matilda became a rallying cry for Australian servicemen and women in two world wars, and remains our sporting anthem of choice.

On January 20, 1942, in the last major battle of the Malayan campaign, Australian soldiers of the 2/29th Battalion charged into a nest of Japanese machine guns to save their comrades. It was an impossible task, but with bayonets fixed and guns blazing’’ they sang Waltzing Matilda at the top of their voices as they were cut down.

Three days later, a group of 13 nurses and a planter’s wife were taken prisoner by the Japanese in Rabaul and loaded onto a truck. They sang Waltzing Matilda as they were carted away. One of the nurses, Sister Jean McLellan of Weranga, near Dalby, spent three-and-a-half years as a prisoner of the Japanese and recalled ``when we marched out in work we shouted `Waltzing Matilda’. We remained cheerful. (The Japanese) were so nonplussed at our refusal to be licked that we were let off lightly.’’

Waltzing Matilda was played at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki when Australians Shirley Strickland and Marjorie Jackson won gold, and it was played at the closing ceremony of the 1956 Olympics. The victorious sailors aboard Australia II sang it after winning the America’s Cup in 1983. Slim Dusty sang it at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Olympics, 19 years after astronauts Bob Crippen and John Young played Slim’s rendition of Banjo’s song from the space shuttle Columbia as it passed over Australia.

The song was most likely written at Dagworth Station near Winton in August or September 1895, when travel records show that Andrew Barton Paterson, then a prominent Sydney solicitor, was in the Winton region with his fiance Sarah Riley and her old school friend Christina ``Chris’’ Macpherson.

Paterson, who wrote under the pen-name Banjo (the name of a bush racehorse his father once owned) was from hardy stock having grown up on struggling sheep properties in NSW, yarning with bullockies and bushmen and listening to tales of bushrangers and blowhards.

By the late 1880s he was a well-known lawyer who wrote poems such as Clancy of the Overflow and The Man from Snowy River for the Bulletin magazine, which also published the verses of a struggling, melancholy house painter named Henry Lawson.

Early in 1895 Banjo was in Sydney playing polo against his roguish acquaintance Breaker Morant and in May that year he rode with the Breaker in the Sydney Hunt Club’s chase for foxes.

At about the same time, the social pages of the Brisbane Courier of May 28, 1895 reported that Sarah Riley had arrived in Rockhampton by steamer for a Queensland holiday. Sarah’s brother ran the huge Vindex station near Winton and before long newspapers reported that she was a hit at the Winton Races, looking ``very neat’’ in her grey frock and sailor hat.

A month after Sarah’s arrival Chris Macpherson, a bespectacled spinster, joined her.

Chris was visiting her four brothers who ran Dagworth Station, a massive holding of more than 100,000 hectares on the Diamantina River, 130km north-west of Winton.

While there she would occasionally pluck out a marching tune on an autoharp or zither. It was called ``Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea’’. Chris had heard the tune played at a steeplechase meeting in Warrnambool, Victoria, in April 1894 and couldn’t get it out of her head.

Banjo had a reputation as a ladies man and the reputation followed him when he joined the two ladies in central Queensland.

The district had recently been aflame with fighting between striking shearers and graziers using scab labour and Banjo heard many stories about the class struggle.

A year before, after months of violence around Winton, Chris Macpherson’s older brother Robert – or ‘Bob Mac’ as most in the area knew him – had 80,000 sheep ready for the shears.

when the property was attacked by 16 union men led by local agitator Samuel Hoffmeister.

Three bullets burst through a cottage and one of the attackers set fire to the woolshed.

The Macphersons spent the next few hours cleaning up the carnage and putting dying lambs out of their misery.

At first light Bob Mac and Constable Senior Constable Michael gave chase but heard from police that Hoffmeister had shot himself beside the Four Mile Billabong – or Combo Waterhole – outside Kynuna.

The phrase “waltzing Matilda” – popularised by Germans on the goldfields – had also caught Banjo’s imagination. According to popular stories, Bob Mac hosted a party at Dagworth that Banjo, Sarah and Chris Macpherson all attended, and Banjo is said to have heard a station overseer tell Macpherson that he had seen a swagman ``waltzing Matilda’’ down by the Diamantina. The expression ``auf der walz’’ meant ``to go tramping’’, while “Matilda” was the name given to a coat that kept swagmen warm.

Banjo would later recall that at Dagworth, ``Miss Macpherson used to play a little Scottish tune on a zither and I put words to the tune and called it Waltzing Matilda. Not a very great literary achievement perhaps, but it has been sung in many parts of the world.’’

Banjo and Chris created a song about a swagman who steals a sheep and then, surrounded by policemen, dives into the water and drowns himself rather than surrender. It’s a tale of the battler defying his oppressors. But the words have a romantic tone as well.

The chorus that Banjo and Chris jotted down are also words of love:

Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, my darling.

Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.

What Banjo was saying to Chris was ``Who’ll come walking beside me and keep me warm at night, my darling, / Who’ll come walking beside me and keep me warm at night.’’

Before long the song was being performed at Winton’s North Gregory Hotel and the Kynuna Hotel. In a short time, everyone in the district was singing it.

Banjo’s engagement to Sarah – like the swagman – was dead in the water, though. His attention to Chris may have been innocent, but according to her relatives he was given his marching orders.

In later years Chris’s grand-niece Dianna Baillieu, who knew Chris as an elderly spinster, said that Banjo’s behaviour at Dagworth was ``caddish’’ and claimed the Macpherson brothers told him ``never to darken their doorstep again’’.

Sarah’s niece Ethel Vivienne Riley, who also knew Chris Macpherson, was adamant that Banjo behaved badly and didn’t let his wandering eye stop just at Chris.

Banjo rarely spoke of that collaboration again. He told a Sydney journalist in the 1920s, that he had a greater affection for Waltzing Matilda than for almost all his other verses, but he had unhappy memories about its composition.

The words to Waltzing Matilda were first published in Queensland’s Hughenden Observer in 1902, and in 1903 Banjo sold the text without music along with some other odds and ends of verse (‘old junk’, he called it) for just £5 to the publishers Angus & Robertson.

The company on-sold the rights to the tea merchants Inglis & Co. who marketed the popular Billy tea brand.

Inglis included the sheet music in packets of Billy tea and an intense marketing campaign further increased the popularity of Banjo’s song.

By the outbreak of the First World War, Waltzing Matilda was a symbol of Australia’s defiance against its enemies.

Last October, I spoke about my biography of Banjo at the Australian Club in Sydney, which was Banjo’s home away from home throughout most of his adult life.

It was there that I met Banjo’s only great-grandson Alistair Campbell, a grazier with three properties in NSW, one of them on Henry Lawson Way in the town of Young. Alistair has recently donated all of Banjo’s original manuscripts including the handwritten verses of Waltzing Matilda to Australia’s National Library.

Banjo eventually married into the wealthy Walker family of pastoralists and died of a heart attack in 1941 after an extraordinary career as a lawyer, globe-trotting journalist, Sydney newspaper editor and army officer.

He will be best remembered for poems that touched Australia’s heart.

At Sydney’s Randwick Racecourse – which had been transformed into an army staging camp in 1914 – Banjo and his friend, the artist Daryl Lindsay, were invited to see a parade of soldiers about to be deployed to The Great War.

Banjo knew many of the young men would never return. He looked into the eyes of the youngsters who would soon be rushing at Germans and Turks under a canopy of bursting shells; who would soon be charging into the ceaseless thresh of machine guns.

The soldiers began singing Waltzing Matilda in chorus and Banjo turned to his famous companion.

``Well, Daryl,’’ he said, with a tear in his eye. ``I only got a fiver for the song, but it’s worth a million to me to hear it sung like this.’’

Grantlee Kieza is the author of the bestselling Paterson biography Banjo, published by HarperCollins/ABC Books