National anthems are irrelevant, especially Advance Australia Fair

Advance Australia Fair is so out of tune with reality it’s almost a parody, writes Terry Sweetman. Yet when a few indigenous footballers decline to sing it, the angry hordes fail to acknowledge what’s really important.

Over the past seven decades and a bit I’ve stood for three national anthems: God Save the King, God Save the Queen and Advance Australia Fair

And given the election result, it seems horribly likely I will again be required to stand for God Save the King before my days are done.

I stood for the king because I was a pants-piddling kindergartener and actually thought there something godlike about the image that looked down from the classroom wall.

I stood for the queen because, if you didn’t, somebody would reach over in a darkened movie theatre and slap you around the lughole.

MORE FROM TERRY SWEETMAN: Age of political entitlement is very much alive

And I have stood for Advance Australia because, well, everyone else was doing it.

I have to confess that apart from those uncritical infant days, the prevailing anthem has meant damn all to me.

I have never sung it because I am tone deaf and I have never bothered to learn more than the first stanzas because the words are frankly embarrassingly anachronistic and bombastic.

The very fact that we have seamlessly moved between anthems without the world spinning off its axis seems to demonstrate how irrelevant they are.

Blues players Josh Morris, Latrell Mitchell, Josh Addo-Carr, Cody Walker and Damien Cook during the Australian national anthem prior to Game 1 of the 2019 State of Origin series. Picture: Dave Hunt/AAP

Yet, when a few indigenous footballers decline to sing Advance Australia Fair it is portrayed as almost as sinister as Guy Fawkes ignoring the No Smoking sign in the parliamentary dungeons.

MORE FROM TERRY SWEETMAN: There’s no shame in knowing your limit

Seriously, why would they want to sing a song for which they feel no affinity and, to the contrary, they see as cruel confirmation of their people’s terrible plight? Fair?

Why would anyone take it seriously given the inequality and injustice that afflicts our nation?

“Young” when our new Minister for Youth Affairs is 61 years old and we just about have to prise ancient politicians off the public teat?

“Free” when a taxation officer whistleblower is threatened with 161 years in jail for exposing abuses of power and all citizens are subject to draconian security legislation unseen since the darkest days of World War II?

“Golden soil” when we have systematically vandalised the land and squandered and stolen the little water we have to nourish it?

“Wealth for toil” when those who earn a living by the sweat of their brows are left with the table droppings of the gilded rich and when those who work unseemly hours are stripped of their recompense?

MORE FROM TERRY SWEETMAN: Why I’m begging my kids not to put me in a home

“Nature’s gifts” when we are well on the way to destroying the Great Barrier Reef and cavalierly dooming entire species in our ravenous quest for transient wealth?

Advance Australia Fair is so out of tune with reality that it is almost a parody.

In the grand scheme of things it is little more than meaningless symbolism, something for people to clutch when they mistake jingoism for patriotism. The boycott of the anthem is not some kind of national insult, akin to American sportsmen taking a knee in protest at their people’s lot.

Instead of getting angry about the symbolic rejection of aural symbolism, we should be getting angry about our collective failure to improve the lot of indigenous Australians and to find true reconciliation with a sorely treated people.

Some might call it nonsense, some might call it grandstanding but those of us who have no experience or understanding of the great shame we have inherited and which we carry forward have absolutely no right to make such a call.

MORE FROM TERRY SWEETMAN: Is there any real hope for our sisters in suffering?

It is important to indigenous people and it should be important to us all. While we’re at it, we should take a good look at the shallowness of the trappings of self-declared patriotism and our declarations of what it means to be an Australian.

Jason Wood, our singularly ill-equipped Minister for Multicultural Affairs declared: “Most migrants when they come here don’t know what it means to be Australian.’’

I’ve got a flash for him.

I’ve been here for 73 years, paid my taxes, raised my kids, did my time in the army, and do my best to be a good citizen but I don’t really know what it means to be an Australian.

You just are. If you have to ask, seek to define it or to carve it in stone you just might be doing it wrong.

Advance Australia Fair has been panel beaten into different shapes several times since it was written in 1879 but, still, in 2001 National Party senator Sandy Macdonald declared it was “so boring that the nation risks singing itself to sleep’’.

I guess that when footballers stand and sing it at least keeps them awake.

@Terrytoo69

Originally published as National anthems are irrelevant, especially Advance Australia Fair