Leave the anthem alone
One global embarrassment in a quarter-full stadium and we want to throw out a song we have sung since 1876.
‘D oes New Zealand need a new national anthem?,’’ TV’s The Project asked on Wednesday. It seemed to be a rhetorical question. We were still deep in mourning four days after our national song was butchered and left for dead at the Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado.
Singer Crystal Collins was wanted in connection with the brutal murder of God Defend
New Zealand. You would have to be a mile high yourself to enjoy that performance. The charitable explanation is that neither Crystal Gayle nor Judy Collins were available.
But should one very bad version inspire a complete overhaul of our anthem? We are such a fickle, nervous, anxious people. We worry that our flag looks too much like someone else’s and so we spend $26 million wondering about whether to change it and then we don’t. One global embarrassment in a quarter-full stadium and we want to throw out a song we have sung since 1876.
While it is an old song, as an anthem it is a relative newcomer. God Save the Queen is still one of two national anthems, with God Defend New
Zealand only achieving equal status in 1977. Since then it has taken off and God Save the Queen, once heard everywhere, is limited to royal occasions.
Hard to believe but God Defend New Zealand had popular, grassroots support. Our athletes sang it at the Munich Olympics in 1972. One hundred years after it was first sung in Dunedin, Garth Henry Latta of that city petitioned to have it recognised as an official anthem.
It might sound like a colonial relic or Victorian dirge to 21st-century ears, but the anthem really emerged during a nationalist moment in the 1970s, within our growing independence from Britain.
Some oppose the song on theistic grounds. Journalist Chris Rattue counted 11 appearances by God, and five mentions of ‘‘Thy’’, three of ‘‘Thee’’ and one of ‘‘Lord’’. For him that is ‘‘20 deity references too many if you have an ounce of rational thought’’.
God defend us from petty Richard Dawkins-style atheism and appeals to narrow rationalism. Despite claims of rising Godlessness, more than half of us identified as religious in the 2013 census. So we can’t throw out the song on those grounds.
The Project crossed live to Dunedin – is there a theme here? – where legendary musician Shayne Carter offered to write a new anthem. Chris Knox made a similar pitch back in the 1990s. But even Carter had to concede a point that has stared us in the face since the 1999 Rugby World Cup: that the Ma¯ori translation of Thomas Bracken’s sometimes clunky lyrics lends them poetry and depth.
Nearly two decades on, New Zealand school children know both versions, while their parents mumble shamefully through the Ma¯ori verse. It is a bicultural phenomenon that has happened relatively easily and organically, thanks initially to singer Hinewehi Mohi, who showed millions of rugby viewers how beautiful te reo can sound.
But how many of them know that the Ma¯ori version improves on Bracken’s confusing lines? Where he wrote about Pacific’s triple star – whatever that is – and shafts of strife and war, the translation asks simply that good may flourish and blessings flow. Maybe it is our singing that needs to change, not the song.