Country music or the lives of bushrangers, swagmen, drovers, stockmen and shearers, continue to influence the genre. This strain of Australian country, with lyrics focusing on Australian subjects, is generally known as "bush music" or "bush band music". "Waltzing Matilda", often regarded as Australia's unofficial national anthem, is a quintessential Australian country song, influenced more by British and Irish folk ballads than by American country and western music. The lyrics were composed by the poet Banjo Paterson in 1895. Other popular songs from this tradition include "The Wild Colonial Boy", "Click Go the Shears", "The Queensland Drover" and "The Dying Stockman". Later
Waltzing Matilda record and comment on the events of the shearers' strike." A number of alternative theories for the origins or meaning of "Waltzing Matilda" have been proposed since the time it was written; however, most experts now essentially agree on the details outlined above. Some oral stories collected during the twentieth century claimed that Paterson had merely modified a preexisting bush song, but there is no evidence for this. In 1905 Paterson himself published a book of bush ballads he had collected from around Australia entitled "Old Bush Songs", with nothing resembling "Waltzing Matilda" in it. Nor do any other publications