National Anthems: the blank armband of amnesia

ABC Lingua Franca, broadcast 19 August, 2006

Transcript
Jill Kitson: Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week, striking a patriotic chord: Michael Connors on the lyrics of those national anthems most footballers failed to sing before their World Cup matches. But when Australia played Croatia, the Aussies in the crowd belted out 'Advance Australian Fair'.


'Advance Australia Fair' had been around for a century when, in a poll held in 1978, 43 per cent of Australians voted for it as our national anthem, ahead of 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'God Save the Queen'. Its idiom and its sentiments belong to the late Victorian era, although the phrase 'girt by sea' probably sounded as archaic and clumsy then as it does now.


Most national anthems were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to express the patriotism and chauvinism of the new nations emerging from the age of imperialism. So their lyrics, even if amended, tend to be at odds with the spirit of goodwill that international sporting contests such as the World Cup, the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics are supposed to embody.


Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. When he watched the World Cup, the words of the anthems stuck in his craw.


Michael Connors: Whether it's the Olympics or the World Cup, the story's the same: beautiful games ruined by dirge- or Eurotrash-styled national anthems. What unites all these styles is the self-induced orgasm of national narcissism. Inside every national anthem is a soccer hooligan waiting to get out.


I'll admit to loving the soccer during the World Cup, and I thought the Socceroos did wonderfully, and yes, we was robbed. But why is it that yobbo-nationalism has to surround big sporting events?


By 'yobbo' I refer not to the hundreds of drunk fans revealing their hard-earned six-packs during excitable TV interviews, but to those opportunist politicians who positively hum over the flower of national sporting glory.


But there is some beauty to it all. Momentarily, as we saw during the World Cup, beautiful men bore the weight of the nation. Their private grief and public struggle somehow climaxed as a national story, in a mesmerising ball game of touch and go. Off the field, multicultural youth patrolled suburbs, beeping horns in homage. Young Asian students in the inner city carried the Australian flag. Loud blokes from the suburbs looked on approvingly. For a few weeks the multicultural nation seemed in communion.


Perhaps though, I am jaded. My blackest moments always came at the beginning of each game. Before a worldwide audience of billions, those beautiful men, possessing extraordinary personal prowess that normally transcends national borders, sang songs that should not be sung.


Some do the anthem thing with more dignity than others. Some are silent as the national anthem is played, preferring to look indifferently composed as the tune plays on. Others feel compelled to mouth words a second too late, like drag queens chasing a soundtrack.


During Australia's run in the World Cup we were subjected to two explicitly offensive national anthems and three fence-sitters. The former are Japan's and Australia's own; the latter the Italian, Brazilian and Croatian anthems. In the interests of international harmony nothing was said about them.


The current Japanese national anthem is the same as it was when it honoured the war criminal, Emperor Hirohito. That he was never charged along with those who ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb is another matter. Anyway the anthem hoped that the Emperor would be around long enough 'for small pebbles to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.' He's gone, but the moss is now creeping over historical memory, with right-wing nationalists seeking to revise the country's view of Japanese militarism.


During the World Cup millions paid respect to the Japanese national anthem. But in Japan, hundreds of teachers have faced disciplinary action for refusing to obey new flag-raising and anthem regulations in schools. What's more, there's an underground version of the anthem titled 'Kiss me' that eerily touches on the issue of wartime 'comfort women'.


This is a hauntingly deranged version which follows phonetically the official anthem. The Korean Times reports that 'Kiss me' is now being discreetly sung by Japanese students, even under the sabre-eye of their patriotic masters. That might give some pause to the Howard government's own flag-raising inclinations; after all, our own anthem is vulnerable to playground satire.


The phrase 'Advance Australia' has a provenance independent of its internment in the national anthem. Frederick Ludowyk, in a recent edition of the newsletter Ozwords, shows that during the colonial era the phrase was mustered to self-congratulate the embryonic nation on its road to greatness. As huts were converted to houses and roads were built, the war cry was 'Advance Australia'. After federation, Ludowyk tells us, the national motto came to serve the purposes of war. The Huon Times in 1917 put it like this, 'They have proved to the Hun that "Advance Australia" is not a mere phrase, but a virile, palpitating reality.'


'Advance Australia Fair' the anthem was written by a Scotsman around 1878. Its early popularity is partly explained by the fact that it spoke to the colonial mentality of the times. Take the original second stanza:

When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd,
To trace wide oceans o'er,
True British courage bore him on,
Till he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England's flag,
The standard of the brave;
With all her faults we love her still,
'Britannia rules the wave!'

'Advance Australia Fair' was favoured as the national anthem by a plurality in a 1977 poll that offered two other choices: 'God Save the Queen' and 'Waltzing Matilda'. In 1981 the National Australia Day Council cleared the decks and expunged three stanzas including the eulogy to Cook. In 1984 the anthem was proclaimed as official.


But despite the cast-off words, the anthem is still so grotesque that to sing it is to put pebbles girt by sea in one's mouth. 'Advance Australia Fair' is so unlike its people that those who sing it look like a dog sneaking a quick one in a public park. Or like an Australianised Hyacinth Bucket (sorry, Bouquet) straining to be dutiful.


It shows how little is on offer when one remembers that even John Howard voted for 'Waltzing Matilda' in the 1977 poll. He's since learned to live with 'Advance Australia Fair', perhaps with that expunged second stanza in mind.


Most Australians have now come to live with the anthem. To my mind it was the acute Kim Beazley in a doorstep interview in 2001 who best explained why this may be the case.

Brian Dawe: Mr Beazley, would the Republic support the national anthem?


John Clarke: Well the national anthem is not contradictory to an Australian republic, it is a multi-disciplinary national anthem that applies both to a situation whether a constitutional monarchy or a republic. I guess having got everybody to learn the words and the tune with great arduous endeavour in the Australian education system over the course of the last, what? 25, 30 years, it would be a bit inconvenient to try a new one.


Brian Dawe: Sandy McDonald says its boring, meaningless, should be scrapped. In this Federation year is it worth looking at a different anthem?


John Clarke: Well look, I stand up on behalf of girt. Girt by sea needs to be celebrated, and if we can't do that regularly when Australia enjoys its sporting triumphs, at the beginning of our school assemblies, I think something would be lost and it is new and decent and essential to the Australian character.

Mr Beazley ran out of breath, so we don't know exactly what would be lost.


The lesser national anthem offenders include Croatia, Brazil and Italy. Then again, every nation has its skeletons. But at least with these three, the lyrics are stirring or gentle as long as we ignore the bloodletting that accompanied nation formation. In Italy's case it's the glory of national liberation that is hummed; the national anthem celebrates the end of the Austrian Eagle's control over that country.

This eagle has drunk the blood of Italy,
Polish blood,
And Cossack blood.
But this has burned his gut.
Let us gather in legions
Ready to die!
Italy has called!

It sounds much better in Italian.


The Croatian anthem is charmingly pastoral and endearing, if patriarchal. The homeland is described as 'our fathers' glory' and the citizens are pledged to eternal love:

Yes, you are our only glory,
Yes, you are our only treasure,
We love your plains and valleys,
We love your hills and mountains.

Quite gentle stuff, as long as one blocks from memory the sounds of the Serb exodus during last decade's Yugoslav wars.


Brazilians, like us, share a view of the Southern Cross and under its dim light their anthem, like ours, glosses over the massacres of indigenous people. Instead, it dreams of futures to wipe out pasts:

By the promise of this equality
We could conquer by our mighty hand.
In thy breast, O Freedom,
Our heart defies death itself.

So what is an anthem other than the blank armband of amnesia? Anthems are the touch-up job that nations need, the botox jab, the shopping therapy, the national counselling session bulk-billed on Medicare.


Behind most national anthems lies shame, shame of a nation's conquering past or its humiliating submission. The quality of that shame is not unique, with each anthem ironically proclaiming a universal condition.


So are anthems of any consequence? They get sung at major events, they occasion tears. In some respects anthems are the emotive Constitution of a homeland. They are eulogies to national ideas. But what would happen if nations were legally held to their (badly) sung ideals?


What if anthems had the power of law, a tuneful Constitution so to speak. Surely supporters of refugees to this land girt by sea might have another option other than relying on the rump of liberals in the Liberal Party. Listen again. Is there not a case that those languishing in Australian detention centres are victims of false advertising?

For those who've come across the seas we've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia fair.

To be sure, the hummingbird of nationalism will flap its wings over beautiful flowers. But what of those demonised, those outcast as 'queue jumpers?' For them, there is nothing other than the flapping wings of alarmism and xenophobia, as the government excises territory from judicial oversight.


So what does all this have to do with the World Cup? Not much, unfortunately. More Australian tears have been spilt over those Italian legions and that unearned penalty goal than will ever be spilt over the wilting of lives in our own, Australian, sanitary gulags.


Jill Kitson: Michael Connors, senior lecturer in politics at La Trobe University. His talk was first published in the online magazine New Matilda. And thanks to John Clarke and Brian Dawe, for the Beazley doorstop. And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.

PS the Clarke/Dawe gig is taken directly from an actual Beazley doorstop.