David Penberthy: Why can’t Harper take a stand?
I DON’T have a problem with our anthem, but Harper Nielsen is entitled to think whatever she likes. And the last time I looked, Australia was a free country, writes David Penberthy.
THERE are some pieces of music that make your spirit soar.
Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Golden Slumbers on side two of The Beatles’ Abbey Road. The ’80s hit I Melt With You by new wave band Modern English. The Star Spangled Banner. L a Marseillaise.
Then there’s Advance Australia Fair.
I love Australia. I am proud of my country and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. As such, it seems a pity we ended up with such a miserable dirge for our national tune.
If you were to devise a spectrum of anthemic excellence, you’d have a capacity crowd at Cardiff singing the Welsh anthem before a rugby international at one end, and a bunch of Aussies mumbling their way through ours at the other.
Our ambivalence toward the anthem is demonstrated by the fact we pride ourselves on not really knowing the words.
Frankly the words are so lame there is little point committing them to memory. The parts we do remember we refuse to sing with anything resembling gusto.
We’ve golden soil and … um … wealth for toil.
Then there’s everybody’s favourite, “girt by sea”, a strangely worded statement of the obvious in that the country is surrounded by a large body of water. It would be just as lyrically inspiring to declare “Our land is mainly arid.”
I can think of three songs that would make a better anthem. Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton’s I Am Australian, because it is both tuneful and lyrical beautiful; Waltzing Matilda, because it is both fun to sing and a hilariously stupid celebration of our criminal heritage; and Daryl Braithwaite’s The Horses, picked only by way of comparison to show how bad Advance Australia Fair truly is.
Anyway. It emerged this week that not liking our anthem — or heaven forbid, not standing for it — is now tantamount to treason. It is especially appalling if you happen to be a nine-year-old girl, who should apparently stick to playing with dollies or listening to Katy Perry albums instead of having a political view.
I have no political problems with the anthem, only aural and lyrical ones. But equally I have no problem with people who do have political problems with it. The last time I looked, Australia was a free country.
Not so if you happen to be nine-year-old Harper Nielsen, the little Brisbane schoolgirl who is facing calls to be expelled from school and even subjected to corporal punishment for refusing to stand for the anthem at a school assembly this week.
Harper, a Year 4 student at Kenmore South State School, decided to protest against Advance Australia Fair, saying it was not inclusive of indigenous Australians.
She thinks the line “young and free” ignores the tens of thousands of years of Aboriginal history.
I don’t agree with her. But I don’t care that she thinks that way. She is entitled to think whatever she likes, as we all are.
To borrow a line from Mark Latham, how dispiriting to see this conga line of suckholes all queuing up to take potshots at this kid.
From Pauline Hanson to Alan Jones to Karl Stefanovic and to Latham himself, the condemnation of this child and her parents came thick and fast.
There was the patronising assertion that Harper as a nine-year-old was incapable of developing political views of her own and must have been brainwashed by her pinko parents.
What a load of nonsense. My older kids are 12 and 15 and they’ve got views on everything. They spent the past two years firing up about the unfairness of gay marriage being illegal.
Admittedly ours might be a more news-oriented house than some, my better half being a politician of the left-wing persuasion, with me hoping they will instead take a more virtuous path (perhaps by toiling in the vineyard of truth for the Murdoch empire). But whatever influence parents do or don’t bring, kids are wholly capable of developing quite sophisticated political views of their own.
The most hysterical attacks on Harper came from Pauline Hanson, who went to the trouble of making a typically breathless and stroppy video denouncing her. “I’d give her a kick up the backside,” she said, harking back to the good old days when kids were thrashed with pieces of cane as part of their education.
Alan Jones and Mark Latham, the Hinge and Bracket of late-night neo-con telly, said Harper should be expelled from school for her insolence.
How’s the gall of these right-wing hypocrites?
Latham until recently was a member of the Liberal Democrats, a party that in my view has a commendable commitment to free speech, even though its leader David Leyonhjelm is a nasty piece of work who has used that freedom to vulgar ends.
How is that conservatives can (rightly) bemoan everything from the Human Rights Commission to ACMA to the vilification of cartoonist Mark Knight, yet demand a primary school student be silenced, punished, even denied an education for expressing a political view?
This whole dumb furore strikes me as an antipodean rerun of the moronic, chest-out nationalism that proliferates in the US.
In Harper Nielsen, we have our own little Colin Kaepernick, the NFL star who infamously took a knee during the national anthem and is now featured in a contentious Nike campaign. To borrow from Nike, my message to Harper would be: Good on you, kid, and just do it.
@penbo