No amount of fiddling can save Advance Australia Fair

Ritual: the Wallabies singing the national anthem this month. Picture: Getty Images

The vast majority of national anthems are the musical and lyrical counterparts of sludge, such woeful wails that the very act of warbling them destroys any vestige of patriotism. God Save the King/Queen, for example. This dirge, around since the 1700s, is the way republicans punish monarchists – and the monarch. How has HM endured this jingoistic jingle thousands upon thousands of times without abdicating?

The only magnificent anthem is, of course, La Marseillaise, quilled around the same time by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in Strasbourg. One hopes he retired on the royalties he so richly deserved. Claude’s marching song thrilled not only French revolutionaries but their distant Russian comrades, who sang it until The Internationale became their international anthem. At the first chord one feels impelled to man at least one barricade.

Peter Dodds McCormick, composer of Advance Australia Fair

Advance Australia Fair? Oh dear. No amount of fiddling with the words can save it. Cursed be the name of its composer, the Scot Peter Dodds McCormick, who dashed it off in 1878. Of course any lyricist would have a problem with rhyming “Australia”. As I’ve pointed out previously, Australia rhymes with failure, which, though utterly appropriate, is hardly inspirational. (Readers have noted it also rhymes with genitalia – which is hardly helpful. And with dahlia and regalia, ditto.)

Failure. It resonates as well as rhymes. Australia celebrates failure like no other nation. Our culture shuns the happy ending. Consider the Anzac myth, allegedly the foundation stone of our Federation. A military disaster wreaked upon us by the Poms. But other failures predate it. Doomed explorers like Burke and Wills. Lost reefs like Lasseter’s. Dudded heroes like Phar Lap and Gough Whitlam. Horne’s Lucky Country was, let us remember, a piece of black humour.

Little wonder we are reluctant to mouth the lyrics (something about “Gert by sea”, whoever she is), if we ever knew them in the first place. Instead we have an unofficial national anthem. No, not I Like Aeroplane Jelly or Happy Little Vegemites. They’re far too cheerful. We opt for Waltzing Matilda. And that waltz isn’t happily Straussian but grimly Antipodean – all about a decidedly unjolly swagman who, camping by a billabong, decides to take his life. And why? Over the disputed ownership of a jumbuck. And what is a jumbuck? Some ancient ancestral animal like a bunyip? No. A scrawny sheep.

That’s us. Despite our regalia, dahlia and genitalia, we’re wedded to woe. Inter alia failure. For years I’ve branded the US a “failed state”. These days it could retaliate with the same accusation as our list of failures lengthens. Our monstrous failure to honour our First Nationals, from the frontier wars to the rejection of the Uluru Statement via terra nullius, the Stolen Generations and continuing deaths in custody. In the proud tradition of White Australia, our failure to treat refugees with decency – with concentration camps rather than compassion. Our utter failure to protect our human population and our flora and fauna from climate change – with its “extreme weather events” culminating in ever fiercer bushfires and “species extinction” (koalas, anyone?). Our failure to keep coal where it belongs: underground. Our failure to save the Great Barrier Grief. Our failure to make our parliamentary precinct safe for women employees. Our failure to create a federal ICAC. Our failure to become a nation in our own right rather than a branch office of Britain. Our failure to elect MPs of gravitas and merit.

Australia? Rhymes with failure.