Australia's Anthem Is Appalling

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Australia’s national anthem is appalling, everyone in Australia knows it, and on the rare occasion, we win gold at the Olympics the rest of the world knows it too. Australia’s current national anthem is perhaps the most misleading, uninspiring and nonsense song ever. It has lines in it such as “our land abounds in natures gifts” which may be true in context but is a sentence no respectable Australian would ever say, I mean try using “joyful strains” in a conversation and I think we already know how people would react. Perhaps the most compelling reason the anthem should be changed is because it completely disregards the Aboriginal people on many occasions, within the first sentence of the anthem the words “ young and free” are used to describe Australia’s history, this completely dismisses the 60,000 plus years of aboriginal culture and the fact that we held them as slaves and treated them as animals for approximately 130 years on their own land, free is the last word I would use to describe this situation. I myself don’t know why it hasn’t been changed earlier. The lyrics of the current anthem have been fiddled with and debated over many times since its making, why not put an end to this and change the whole song to something more appropriate for the Australian spirit, its not like we would have any trouble changing it as we and other countries have done it successfully before. Let’s take and stand and get a new anthem that embodies the Australian spirit and recognize the people and history of our country.

The Australian national anthem is boring and misleading and uninspiring. Many of the phrases in the anthem are outdated and inaccurate for example we claim that we have “boundless plains to share” and yet we can’t maintain our current immigrant policy, and decide whether we will share it, what kind of light does this shine on our nation. According to the Australian parliament, the most recent homelessness data released in 2018 showed approximately 116,427 people homes on the night of the census and yet we claim we have “wealth for toil”. Well I acknowledge that we are one of the most privileged countries, saying that we have “wealth for toil” is false and hurtful to people like James who was homeless with his children and wife because his hard work failed to pay the rent. James is an Australian man whose story is used to promote Mission Australia a Christian charity who help people all over Australia, “not too long ago, James and his wife Sophie were your typical Australian family, with two young children, Rosie (7) and Billy (5), and a much-loved family dog. James worked hard to support his family but when his party-planning business collapsed, his world was turned upside down. No longer able to pay the rent, the family was evicted from their home without a place to go.” Where his story goes from here that Mission Australia helped them to build back their normal family life, but the message I draw from this story is that James worked hard to support his family and despite this was still not able to maintain a life of regularity let alone a life of wealth. The line “wealth for toil” implies that with work in Australia comes wealth, which we can see is clearly not accurate for some of the 116,427 homeless people like James, work hard and are still not rewarded. As well as misleading the Australian anthem is profoundly uninspiring, so much so that I would be willing to bet that at least one if not more people here hardly know the lyrics to the second verse little own the whole song, This is the case for many Australians as it is so boring that no one bothered learning the lyrics. If you watch an Australian sporting team trying and failing to sing the national anthem words you will see exactly what I mean. The National anthem also hold many values no longer relevant to Australia, it was written by a Scottish man the name of Peter McCormick who migrated to Australia in 1855, people coming here from other countries between 1788 and 1968 is literally how we colonized and pretty much everyone in Australia at the time except aboriginals grew up in other countries. Having our anthem written by someone who spent most of their influential life growing up in another country may have been the way of that era, but since then we have become an actual country and developed our own culture and ethos separate from other counties, shouldn’t our anthem too? 

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