Let’s hear it for Waltzing Matilda

By Julian Cribb

In 1878, when it was first written, Advance Australia Fair might have had a grain of nationalistic truth to it.

140 years later it reads like pure satire. A national joke. The sort of anthem The Chaser or Mad as Hell might have composed.

Take the title: is there anyone who would seriously argue Australia is ‘fair’, either in terms of how we treat people like migrants, Muslims, women, First Australians, refugees, the poor, the sick, the disabled, altar boys, the elderly and the jobless? 

Or that an Australia largely clear-felled for ‘development’, blighted by 60,000 toxic mine sites no-one will ever clean up, its aquifers punctured like the arms of an addict by a billion drill cores, its Reef in ruins, is ‘fair’ compared to what it was?

Soprano Greta Bradman singing The Australian National Anthem.

Photo: Vince Caligiuri

“Let us rejoice, for we are young and free.” Well, we’re a lot less young than we used to be – in 1900 one in 25 Australians were aged 65 plus; today its one in seven; by mid-century, the figure will be one in four. The typical Aussie then lived 52 years, now its 82 years. So the image of golden youth doesn’t quite cut it in the wizening present.

Free. Now that’s a joke. Since 2001 more than 50 new laws, powers and offences have been introduced that restrict or curtail the freedoms enjoyed by all previous generations of Australians. The Law Council of Australia notes: “Many of those laws contain measures that run contrary to established notions of criminal justice. Many of those laws were rushed through parliament but have never or very rarely been used. In short, Australia has been left with a legacy of flawed and unnecessary legislation.”

The Government has legislation on the table giving it power to pry into almost any aspect of your data or private affairs it wishes.

“The succession of data access legislation in the Australian parliament is fast becoming a Mad Hatter’s tea party,” UNSW Professor Greg Austin says.

“Could it be that the proliferation of government security roles is a self-perpetuating industry leading to ever more government powers for privacy encroachment?” You bet, mate.

At a more basic freedom level, as we become more like America and less like Australia, the prison population is exploding: from 25,000 in 2007 to 42,000 today – an increase of 68% in a  per cent decade.  Any way you cut it, Australians are a lot less free than they were a generation ago, but our ridiculous anthem cheerfully conveys the opposite.

“We’ve golden soil...” Well, we had, maybe. In 1878. Then a lot of it got over cleared, overcropped, overgrazed and overdeveloped – and just blew away. It turned mountains in Antarctica and New Zealand pink. It covered Sydney and Melbourne in dust-storms estimated to contain up to 5 million tonnes of ‘golden soil’.

“Current rates of soil erosion by water across much of Australia now exceed soil formation rates by an order of magnitude or more,” the government’s own State of the Environment Report reads. Our anthem gilds a national disaster, for which no end is yet in sight.

“...and wealth for toil.” On paper the ‘average Aussie’ owns a $50,000 slice of the national pie (GDP per capita). But, as Credit Suisse and Oxfam recently observed, the top 250,000 mega-rich own more than the poorest 18 million Australians put together. No matter how hard you toil, wealth for most is now beyond reach, being discreetly and regularly redistributed among a handful of business families and their political lapdogs. If you can’t afford a politician or two, you’re unlikely to make it big in the Land of Opportunity.

“Our home is girt by sea.” More sea than ever, thanks to climate change. The only truthful line in the entire AAF lampoon. Melting the Arctic and Antarctic is a one-way street: once it gets a go on, thanks to fossil fuels and political inaction, it cannot be stopped. This will ultimately raise sea levels by an estimated 65 metres worldwide.

Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin and the Gold Coast, along with a host of smaller coastal towns, will vanish beneath the waves. Only the top of the Harbour Bridge and the 21st storey of the taller CBD towers will be poking out. Twenty-million Aussies will have to relocate. So girt by sea is not such a great thing.

“Our land abounds in nature’s gifts of beauty rich and rare.” Well it certainly once did – but ask the Tassie Tiger. We have eliminated 40 native animals and birds and have a further 106 lined up in the gunsight. Our governments and the fossil fuel sector are doing their level best to abolish the Great Barrier Reef. Having removed half the continent’s trees since white settlement we bulldozed another million hectares, mostly in Queensland, in the four years to 2016 alone. Legislation currently in draft will triple the devastation.

“Beneath our radiant Southern Cross we’ll toil with hearts and hands.” In fact most of us knock off, come 5 o’clock. As for toiling with hearts and hands, at least 3 million Australian jobs are slated for replacement by a robot or artificial intelligence, which have neither.

A first edition Waltzing Matilda sheet music.

Photo: Steven Siewert

“For those who’ve come across the seas We’ve boundless plains to share.” The blackest satire in the entire rigmarole. Endorsed by both sides of politics, the plains of Manus Island and Nauru are hardly boundless. As for sharing, forget it mate. If you’re a new chum, especially an African or a woman in a headscarf, you’re on your Pat Malone.

Sung joyously, or even as a lament, Advance Australia Fair is scarcely honest anthem material. It’s a
giant national pisstake, designed to evoke a ‘vision splendid’ Australia that probably never existed and certainly never will if the powers-that-be have any say. Its designed to make the hoi polloi feel good about themselves while having their pockets picked and their data stolen. It should be consigned to history’s wheelie bin without further ado.

Assuming we even need an anthem – and I concede there is a case to jerk the occasional beery tear before Grand Final kickoff, or when the (debated) Aussie flag mounts the gold pole at the Olympics – why not Waltzing Matilda? Everyone knows it, everyone loves it and 100 years on it still speaks truth to power in a way the current saccharine chant never will.

The swaggie is a quintessential Aussie. Down-on-his-luck – but tenacious, ingenious, tough as teak and fond of a good barbie. Like most today, he is up against the plutocracy with its po-faced, uniformed henchpersons, one, two, three. A true battler, he’d rather die than yield. He has guts.

All right, the words are a bit quaint – but who needs words? Most Australians don’t even know the words of Advance Australia Fair. We can all hum Waltzing Matilda, or sing it if we choose, like all the generations gone by since 1895, when Banjo Patterson first penned it.

So let’s hear it for Waltzing Matilda – instead of this obnoxious, disingenuous propaganda we arepresently compelled to mumble.

Julian Cribb is a Canberra-based author.

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/national/act/let-s-hear-it-for-waltzing-matilda-20180917-p504al.html