The Mouth: Why the Super Bowl should be Australia’s new national day
It’s the The Mouth’s tasty solution to ‘change the date’: A full-blown Super Bowl celebration to close out an Aussie summer. Hey, we’ve embraced Halloween …
Confidential
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Australia, we have a problem.
On the one hand, we have a national day that every year brings out a bunch of self-righteous refuseniks who treat the whole thing like a political Dry July where they can’t wait to tell you they’re not having a drink (but are fine with you partying, if you really must).
But on the other, if we got rid of it we’d still need some sort of bookend to summer and the silly season to top us up with fun and frivolity for the long hard slog to the Melbourne Cup.
So here is the idea.
We make the official national day of celebration Federation Day, which just happens to be January 1.
Diehards can go to flag raisings and the rest of us can have an excuse for a recovery barbecue.
And then to round things out we make Superbowl Sunday – which is a Monday in Australia – the official end of summer.
Once you start to think about it, such a shift would solve a myriad of problems (did someone say, long weekend?).
After all, Australians don’t really do “national days” but they 100 per cent do sports and parties and sports-themed parties.
Our natural need to gather around a box and watch an incomprehensible sport (just what the hell is a “down”, anyway?) has been suffering due to the dull woke-ification of test cricket.
Here, a massive summer NFL clash could be just the thing to fill that gap.
And if the climate people are right, pushing out the unofficial Australian summer by a couple of weeks simply makes sense because really, who wants to get seriously stuck into the year when it is still in the 30s?
This acknowledgment, plus the fact that we’d no longer be celebrating Australia Day on “Invasion Day”, might even be enough to stop the Greens from whingeing.
Yes, we know, who are we kidding.
We also get that there might be complaints that this is all too American for comfort but more and more we’ve made our peace on this front and aren’t still mad at Uncle Sam.
If all the little Hugos and Amelias who go traipsing around this column’s suburb in non-scary culturally sensitive costumes every Halloween are anything to go by, we have no trouble appropriating American holidays as our own.
The recent rise in real barbecue, buffalo wings, and all sorts of other great American foods by much of the country has already laid the groundwork for the massive feasts that traditionally accompany the Super Bowl.
And just maybe, in this age of AUKUS, this sort of shared cultural affinity might speed up the delivery of those promised subs (faster, please, we think we see a “weather balloon” overhead) by a week or even ten days.
Now, can we have a chat about Thanksgiving?
— The Mouth is an anonymous critic and bon vivant who pays his own way around Sydney and beyond.
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