A mystery in Australia's musical history has been solved with the first recorded singer of Waltzing Matilda tracked to the Kimberley town of Broome.

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia has more than 300 different versions of the song on file, but it was the origins of the earliest recording that sparked a search from Canberra to Western Australia's north-west coast.

The two-minute audio track is scratchy and faint, and recorded by a little known tenor called John Collinson.

Archivist Graham McDonald said the 1926 recording intrigued him from the outset.

"It's not a particularly wonderful recording - it's done quickly, and the melody has been changed a bit from any of the other versions we know of," he said.

"Apparently it didn't sell many copies.

"But it's significant in that Mr Collinson was the first person to record Waltzing Matilda that we know of, over in London, before there was a recording industry in Australia."

Nothing was known of the enigmatic performer, so Mr McDonald began trawling through newspaper archives and historical records to piece his story together.

What emerged was a portrait of a quiet and polite man with an adventurous streak, who carved out a small place in Australian history but died an unknown in the remote pearling town of Broome.

An unexpected life

Mr McDonald hit the jackpot early in his search, finding the only known image of the mystery singer Collinson online.

The video clip was taken from a British newsreel from around 1930, and shows a rather stiff but handsome young man performing a romantic song on stage, accompanied by a piano player and wearing a smart tuxedo.

It emerged that Collinson was a working-class lad from Newcastle-on-Tyne, who sailed to Australia in 1914 and promptly signed up for the Australian Army.

"He got sent off to Gallipoli later that year, and then to the western front, where he was wounded quite severely," said Mr McDonald.

"He was shot through both forearms and was being operated on to repair that damage, and as he was coming out of the anaesthetic he started singing in quite a melodious voice."

As luck would have it, one of the medical staff who overheard him sing was friends with the conductor of London's annual Prom Concerts.

Collinson was soon having singing lessons, and headed back to London for a moderately successful career as a stage performer.

It was there that he married, had two children, and at some point recorded Waltzing Matilda.

The search for Collinson's past dried up until the late 1930s when he set sail for Western Australia.

"In 1938 he appeared on a boat to Perth - with a woman who was not his wife," explains Mr McDonald.

"We have no idea what he did between then and the early 1960's, when he appeared in Broome."

A town full of strangers

As many did before him - and as many still do - Collinson appears to have merged into the Broome community with few questions asked of his past.

Gwen Knox grew up opposite his house, which sat perched among the mangroves on the edge of Roebuck Bay.

"He used to ride past the house on his bike, and I always thought he was quite interesting because he had callipers on his hands, and I don't know what had happened," she said.

"Sometimes I'd hang on the fence and wave hello, and he'd always wave hello back.

"He seemed a quiet man, and at the occasional times we'd go to church, the Anglican church next door, he used to take the collection money and distribute the prayer books."

Looking back, Ms Knox wonders at the earlier life her neighbour led, treading the boards of theatre-halls in London.

"We didn't even know he could sing, or play an instrument," she said.

"We would quite often have people having people under our tamarind tree with their instruments, or for a sing-along or on our veranda, and we would could have invited him along if we'd known!"

Local legend has it Collinson was dead for several days before his body was found, laying in the bedroom of his waterfront shack.

Mr McDonald is philosophical about the gaps that remain in John Collinson's story.

"It's quite a story - a working class boy from Newcastle Upon Tyne didn't normally become an opera singer," he said.

"What happened to his family? Who was this woman that he arrived back in Australia with? And what did he do through the 1940's and 50's? Those are the questions we haven't been able to find answers to, and we'd love to find out.

"It's a constant challenge to be finding more about the old recordings in Australia, but by telling the stories of Waltzing Matilda we're effectively telling the story of the Australian recording industry."