Anthony Mundine is right. The national anthem is racist
HERE’S a sentence you don’t hear every day: Anthony Mundine is right. Australia’s national anthem really is racist.
HERE’S a sentence you don’t hear every day: Anthony Mundine is right.
Mundine has said he won’t stand for the national anthem ahead of his bout against Danny Green at the Adelaide Oval.
And Advance Australia Fair really IS racist. Or at least it was.
The original last verse of the song, written by Peter Dodds McCormick in 1878, made it clear that the settlers of the Great Southern Land stood ready to defend the British bloodline from foreign invaders:
Should foreign foe e’er sight our coast,
Or dare a foot to land,
We’ll rouse to arms like sires of yore,
To guard our native strand;
Britannia then shall surely know,
Though oceans roll between,
Her sons in fair Australia’s land
Still keep their courage green.
And just in case this wasn’t obvious enough the verse was rewritten during World War I to emphasise:
Britannia then shall surely know,
Beyond wide oceans roll,
Her sons in fair Australia’s land
Still keep a British soul.
According to the sheet music in the National Library, McCormick thanked the late professor Stuart Blackie for this “improvement”.
The original also referred to “Australia’s sons”, making it deeply sexist too. And it declared “Britannia rules the wave” so it was also militaristic, imperialist, colonialist and anglo-centric.
Moreover there is not a single mention of the LGBTIQ community, so it is probably homophobic as well.
Now I’m not a professional historian, but one possible reason for this is IT WAS WRITTEN A CENTURY AND A HALF AGO.
But here’s the catch: The song never became our national anthem until 1984. The two verses referring to British wave-ruling and strand-defending were completely deleted and “Australia’s sons” was replaced with “Australians all”.
And the new second verse was reworked to make it a universal welcome to all migrants to this, an overwhelmingly immigrant nation. As a certain lamb ad observed, ultimately we are all boat people.
These days the real problem with the national anthem isn’t that it’s racist, it’s that it’s boring as batshit. Both lyrically and melodically it is a dull, uninspiring dirge.
The most interesting thing about it is that it contains the word “girt”.
But of course there’s another catch: Advance Australia Fair was voted for in a 1977 poll in which it defeated both Waltzing Matilda and God Save the Queen — as well as the fourth place-getter Song of Australia. (This last sings praise to “worshippers at Mammon’s shrine”. Strangely, it never caught on.)
In other words, the anthem might be boring but it’s also democratically elected — basically the same difficulty we had with Kevin Rudd.
Of course we could always try holding a new plebiscite to pick a new national anthem but apparently the only thing Australia is worse at than picking national anthems is holding plebiscites.
However that doesn’t mean the people can’t have their say. In fact, the people have already spoken.
Ask any red-blooded Australian what song they want at one o’clock in the morning and the answer is always the same. And you know the one I’m talking about.
Yes, it’s time for Khe Sanh to be made our national anthem.
Not only is it perhaps the greatest song this country has ever produced, its lyrics actually mean something instead of being a checklist of geological virtues.
And for those still aggrieved about the First Fleet, what better counterpoint to ships sailing into Sydney than planes flying out of it?
Like our nation, it is a song fused with pain and joy, anguish and delight, the ghosts of the past and a voyage to an unknown future.
And of course it has the most quintessential quality that any Australian anthem must have: No one knows the words to the second verse.