Music Monday - Happy New Year, Happy New Anthem?

Happy New Year to all music teachers. May this be a year which slowly improves on 2020 and may we all resume choir singing and directing without fear of spreading Covid-19.

Over the past few days in Australia, discussion has again started on our Australian national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. It’s a bit of a dirge musically and the words have long been seen as inappropriate to Indigenous Australians as well as those who have come here from all over the world. Our conservative prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced that as of 1st January 2021, one word of the anthem would be changed – from ‘For we are young and free’ to ‘For we are one and free’. Almost as though this simple change will solve the many other issues with the text of the song. And to be honest, in a crowd singing the changed line, who would really know? 

I took another look at the complete verses of Advance Australia Fair, written by Peter Dodds McCormick in the 1870s. Verse 2 is particularly irksome, especially to Aboriginal Australians, the original custodians of this land:

When gallant Cook from Albion sail’d,

To trace wide oceans o’er,

True British courage bore him on,

Til 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.”

In joyful strains then let us sing

Advance Australia fair.

Surely we can do better than this? 

Personally, I think an obvious time to change the anthem would be at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign – when I hope we will finally become a republic. In the meantime though – is a one word change enough?