Steve Price: Let the larrikins rise up to unite against the woke in modern Australia
It’s tough to be accepted in modern Australia if you’re not woke or beholden to noisy advocacy groups but the larrikins must hit back and ignore the finger-wagging culture warriors.
Opinion
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Music legend John Farnham’s family and friends released a feature-length documentary about the superstar singer this week.
We discovered at launch it almost didn’t even get to the funding stage with backers of the doco claiming various film funding bodies considered the subject to be a ‘pale, stale, male’ story.
John Farnham: Finding The Voice, is so good and so moving, I shed a tear at the premiere on Tuesday night and I don’t cry in dark theatres very often.
John Farnham being an older white Anglo-Saxon man I suspect didn’t help the funding battle either. It’s not been said by those close to him but hinted at.
John’s long-time manager and close friend, the late Glenn Wheatley, wasn’t one to take no for an answer and eventually convinced Sony Pictures and the Seven Network to partner with him and the team.
Thank god they never gave up because the end result is a credit not just to the beauty of Farnham’s voice, but an old-fashioned rags to riches, back to rags, and success-again story.
Its packed premiere came a day after details of another Australian superstar’s state funeral were made public.
Barry Humphries’ state funeral — an honour offered to his family by both Victoria and NSW — is to be held in Sydney.
The family’s decision should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the way the creator of such iconic characters as Dane Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson was treated by the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
Un-funny Festival organisers tore Humphries’ name off a comedy award and snubbed him.
In death the greatest Australian comedy star, ever, has had his revenge on his birthplace of Melbourne. Sydney gets the funeral and Victorians may even have to pay some of the costs.
What an irony that is. Embarrassingly this week Premier Daniel Andrews wouldn’t or couldn’t confirm who was paying for what.
The family is said to want no Victorian involvement, including money, anywhere near Barry’s funeral.
The Farnham and Humphries examples for me highlight how difficult it has become in modern Australia to be accepted if you happen to be old school and not woke or beholden to noisy advocacy groups who demand inclusion in every facet of our lives.
These people thankfully don’t represent wider Australia or the general public view of what’s great music or a funny gag or an opinion that doesn’t fit their narrative.
Real Australians still appreciate a larrikin, a not-politically-correct joke or an old-fashioned view that doesn’t fit the narrow, cloying, hectoring noise from social media and the lecturing classes.
We love the dribbling Les Paterson, the Royal-loving Dame Edna and we revel in the fact that John Farnham might not be fashionable in certain circles but boy he has a great voice and is a great bloke.
Sensibly I get the feeling that the silent majority of Australians might be starting to stir and to rise up against the overbearing social bullies that demand inclusion in every aspect of our lives.
I hope so because most of us have had enough.
As deferential as we are to the Indigenous population of Australia present and past, do we really need to have a welcome to country ceremony performed at practically every public event.
Personally, I don’t need to be welcomed to my own country. I also don’t understand the use of Indigenous place names. The majority of us have no idea even where these places are and I’m convinced most aboriginal people couldn’t care less about this virtue signalling.
How does the ABC AM program telling its dwindling audience its being broadcast from Gadigal land help rid remote Indigenous communities of violent teenage street crime, domestic violence and drug use? Of course it doesn’t.
This creeping destruction of our treasured traditions and the insertion of all these checks and balances on what we can say, who we can say it to and who we should be able to talk about is choking the Australian personality.
It means sadly that personality and leadership in this country – Victoria in particular – is at an all-time low. Anyone with strong independent original opinions is quickly run out of town.
Examples include Sam Newman basically run out of the media. Sam was seen as too much of a loose cannon. Really, he’s just an intelligent conservative free thinker, who tells it like it is.
Even Eddie McGuire, our best live TV performer and a radio veteran, walked away from his radio show because he’s seen as being too opinionated and didn’t fit that neat little box FM radio likes to place people in.
Take politics; a Jeff Kennett-style leader, all bluff and bluster treating the media with shovel loads of sand, wouldn’t last five minutes in politics.
All that leaves us with is slippery characters like Daniel Andrews or grey nobodies like Matthew Guy or his successor John Pesutto.
Further back, imagine Graham Kennedy, Ernie Sigley, Don Lane or even Bert Newton surviving the cancel culture – they wouldn’t.
It’s time the larrikins of Australia hit back and ignored the finger-wagging culture warriors starting with Dame Edna’s Sydney state funeral.
Our ABC should televise it nationally.
Just don’t hold your breath!
Originally published as Steve Price: Let the larrikins rise up to unite against the woke in modern Australia
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