No nation’s anthem remains sacrosanct
AUSTRALIAN history wars have been superseded by culture wars (the name, frame, blame, shame, tame game). Opinion pieces during NAIDOC week, including a Townsville Bulletin editorial (12/11), have been very supportive of the Premier of NSW’S virtue signalling to change one word in the opening lines of Australia’s national anthem to once again make it more inclusive.
Evidently some of our First Australians, literally and metaphorically, won’t stand for Advance Australia Fair.
The offensive epithet in terms of Indigenous cultural identity is “young”. Cathy Freeman had previously advocated its replacement with “one”. A Yorta Yorta soprano refused to sing the anthem at an AFL grand final. It was removed from the opening of Anthony Mundine’s fights because he refused to stand for it.
The nine-year-old daughter of two associate professors at a Brisbane school assembly gained much media traction: “The reason why I don’t sing it or stand is because – Advance Australia Fair
means advance White Australia … When it says we are young, it completely ignores the fact that Indigenous culture was here for over 50,000 thousand years before colonisation.”
Some Australians are under the misapprehension the national anthems of all the other nations are sacrosanct. Unfortunately, numerous anthems and patriotic songs in postcolonial Western society have been interrogated for their historic perspective and noninclusiveness. Prince Charles announced God Save the Queen
was politically incorrect (BLM activists got Rule Britannia
banned). Angela Merkel chose to ignore any sinister Nazi connotations of Deutschlandlied
and refused to change it to fit with the Zeitgeist.
Satirist John Shortis renders Waltzing Matilda – once considered the country’s “unofficial national anthem and banned by the National Party from a Wallabies/all Blacks rugby match for encouraging sheep stealing – politically correct
Shortis expunges any connotations of sexism, racism, LGBTQ discrimination, drug and alcohol abuse: “Once a jolly swag person temporally halted by a watercourse, under the shade of an Indigenous species of eucalypt tree.” WILLIAM ROSS,
Cranbrook
MANNERS COULD BE KEY
Considering another point of view in regards to the bad youth local crime problem, something occurred to me that seems to indicate that falling personal standards are a major contributor.
As a man now in my late 50s, and thinking back to my formative school age years of the late ’60s and into the ’70s, I remember how things used to be. I recall how our schools and even parental guidance would always empathise the importance of good behaviour and good personal manners, and that was always allied with (occasionally harsh, but necessary) discipline. And most of the time, it worked perfectly and behavioural standards of youth at that time were pretty good.
Compare that with the present, and almost uniformly we see an unfortunately large drop in the behavioural standards of today’s youth. Even things such as good personal manners seem to be a comparative rarity, as I have personally observed.
Remember when you we were routinely taught to say “please and thank you”? Well, I still do, but sadly my friends who work in the popular drive-through food takeaways tell me the standards of speech and manners among youth are often appallingly bad.
In the end, the connection between bad behaviour, bad manners and criminal behaviour is obvious. People’s standards have been allowed to fall badly and what we see now is an inevitable result – and youth crime is a part of it. Is it really that simple? Sadly, I think yes.
FELIX SCERRI, Ingham
TRUMP’S ILLUSION VORTEX
It’s the fairytale: “The Emperor’s New Clothes” conspiracy, deluding Trump’s passionate, misguided base. He traps them in his own vortex, an illusion.
While Biden is prioritising his COVID-19 plan, Trump has shifted his rhetoric, insisting he, too, has been focused on it – as 125,000 American cases continue daily – taking credit for the vaccine: “On my watch”, for a virus he attests will “just go away”.
COVID deaths statistics are a game-changer that cannot be ignored. But his continual emphasis on the “stolen” election, individually being overturned by the courts, immerses him in a slow-cooker. Trump’s enablers, leading Republicans, dance to his denigration of the established electoral process, facilitating his “rigged” claims to publicly fester. It is unconscionable, with potential for civil war.
ELOISE ROWE, Tannum Sands