Let’s get something out of the way early: even in the fairly unimpressive category of national anthems, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ is a C- at best.
Musically it’s nothing special, lyrically it’s largely about economics and contains the arcane-even-at-the-time-of-writing word “girt” out of nowhere
Peter Dodds McCormick wrote it in 1878 in the hopes that Australia would federate, which only took another 23 years, but now it’s turned into a big stupid Australia Day-style flashpoint.
One one side are folks who think that it’s got white supremacist overtones. And they’re not wrong either – calling the thing “Advance Australia It’s OK To Be White” would have been too much of a giveaway, but describing ourselves “young” neatly eliminates a massive amount of non-European history, a point not remotely lost on First Australians.
Is our national anthem for everyone? #TheWeekly pic.twitter.com/RusIZfug2e
— The Weekly (@theweeklytv) June 5, 2019
And on the other side of the argument are those who think that it’s a founding tune-document of our proud nation and HOW VERY DARE YOU EVEN SUGGEST CHANGING ONE PERFECT WORD?
And we could point out that the national anthem was actually ‘God Save The Queen’ until 1984 (though AA-Fair had been made the “national song” in 1974), so the song’s noble and immutable history as our national anthem is as venerable as Jimmy Barnes’ solo career.
Can’t we make this one word our national anthem?
Or we could point something rather more pertinent out, which is that we’ve already changed the lyrics. Like, heaps of times.
First up, we left out all the verses about how awesome Britain is. And we dropped the verse about how we could totally take any country that looks at us funny (and contains the phrase “native strand” which would definitely have drawn attention away from “girt”.
WHO WANTS SOME, REST OF THE WORLD???
But also, the very first line used to be “Australia’s sons, let us rejoice”. And that was changed to “Australians all” in the interests of being inclusive of the nation’s non-sons. And spoiler: society didn’t crumble as a result. Turns out you can alter songs and it’s actually fine.
And sure, all this could be eliminated if we would just do as I have long advocated and officially our true national anthem – John Farnham’s immortal ‘Pressure Down’ – but until that magnificent and inevitable day, there’s nothing wrong with giving the old one a once-over.
