Tetherd Cow Ahead

Australia Day, a holiday in which some Australians apparently feel the need to inflict their Australianess upon anyone whom they don’t feel is Australian enough, has come and gone with a minimum of incident.

Personally, I really dislike the jingoistic display of Nationalism that goes with the holiday. It’s tasteless and crass, and for the most part meaningless for a great many White Australians who dwell eternally in some kind of isolated limbo outpost of the British Isles and resolutely still attempt to conjure the Green and Pleasant Land in a continent that is predominately desert.*

Most Australians are, even today, foreigners living in a strange land and I wonder if the hoo-ha of Australia Day is just a desperate attempt to reassure our group consciousness that yes, we really truly belong here.

The self-delusion is intriguingly illuminated in the words of our National Anthem:

Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil,
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in Nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history’s page, let every stage
Advance Australia fair!
In joyful strains then let us sing,
“Advance Australia fair!”

Beneath our radiant southern Cross,
We’ll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing
“Advance Australia fair!”

Let’s examine some of those extravagant claims:

‘We are young and free’

Our population, like most of the Western World is aging, so generally speaking we are not young. Free? Well, I guess that depends on your point of view. Australian citizen David Hicks is not exactly free. And people who don’t kiss the flag are not exactly free. But I guess ‘Some of us are young and most of us are free’ doesn’t scan so well.

‘We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil’

Not right now we don’t. We’ve got parched deserts of red earth that blows up in vast dry dust storms. We’ve got crackling-dry eucalyptus forests that burst into flames at the touch of a discarded cigarette butt. We are experiencing the worst recorded drought in Colonial White history. Farmers are going out of business faster than you can say ‘Tie me kangaroo down sport’.

‘Our land abounds in Nature’s gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;’

This is true. Hardly anyone notices however, because they are too busy clearing Nature’s gifts with bulldozers to build shopping centres or digging up the abundant land to get at the coal underneath.

‘Beneath our radiant southern Cross,’

Sadly, our Radiant Southern Cross is not very visible through the pollution in most capital cities, Australia being as it is, the highest producer of CO2 per capita of any country in the world.

‘For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share’

Boundless plains of bone-dry dirt made worse by the aforementioned clearing of Nature’s gifts. Which we’ll share with you if you demonstrate the proper Aussie Valuesâ„¢

Moving on, it’s also interesting to examine some of the verses of the National Anthem that are left out of the Official Version:

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,
“Brittannia rules the wave!”
In joyful strains then let us sing
“Advance Australia fair!”

Shou’d foreign foe e’er sight our coast,
Or dare a foot to land,
We’ll rouse to arms like sires of yore
To guard our native strand;
Brittannia then shall surely know,
Beyond wide ocean’s roll,
Her sons in fair Australia’s land
Still keep a British soul.
In joyful strains the let us sing
“Advance Australia fair!”

The execrable language is crime enough (‘We’ll rouse to arms like sires of yore’? Puh-leeze!) but the toadying up to The Empire is, I fear, something that still runs deep in Australian psyche. True, we toady to a different Empire these days, but there’s a distinct smell of ‘once a crawler, always a crawler’.

If it was me, I’d flush the whole thing down the dunny and replace it with something much more beautiful:

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies –
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror –
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die –
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land –
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand –
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

With some hint of poetry like those immortal words of Dorothea McKellar running through all our veins, maybe we might at last shake off our 19th Century Empirical shackles and grow to love this country for what it is rather than remain hell-bent on demeaning it as a source of plunder and something to be conquered for our materialistic gain.

Maybe then Australia Day will mean something more than just waving a flag.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Including the Prime Minister, John Howard, and his cabinet, who doggedly resist efforts to discard the outdated English monarchy and allow Australians to have the republic that should be ours if we were really sincere about advancing Australia fair with any kind of ‘courage’ like it says in the song…

___________________________________________________________________________

Shiver me timbers me lads! And serve me up another cup o’ grog!

I’m back from the High Seas, faithful Acowlytes, and what a mighty adventure it was. The sights I saw! The fearsome sea serpents I battled!

Violet Towne and I have been on a trip to the Whitsunday Islands in Northern Queensland, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Under any circumstances this would have been a wonderful thing to have done, but it was even more of a treat owing to the fact that I won the holiday in last year’s Australian Maritime Museum Christmas Raffle.

Specifically, the prize was three days sailing on the Tall Ship the Derwent Hunter, a striking two-masted vessel made in the 1940s from the finest Australian ship-building timbers available. I don’t want to make you too jealous, but basically, we spent three days on the deck of a beautiful wooden ship, sailing under clear blue skies by day and star-filled skies by night. We swam off beaches of powdery white silica sand and dived among fishes so colourful that they put the rainbow to shame.

Lest you think this all sounds a little too much like Paradise, let me return to the bit about the fearsome sea serpents. Consider the sign that we encountered on our arrival:

I just want to point out that this BIG sign encompasses only jellyfish. It says nothing of sharks, stingrays, giant octopods or other ship-eating fishy things. But trust me, the jellyfish alone are enough to keep you in the cocktail bar.

Especially this one:

You may have missed a salient point here, so I will reiterate it – Size: 12mm. Twelve millimeters. About half an inch. Also – ‘transparent jellyfish – usually never seen’.

Up until 1964 the main evidence that someone had come into contact with an Irukandji was their dead body washed up on the beach… But I exaggerate for effect; in actual fact, death from the Irukandji is rare even if the symptoms are dire: back pain, nausea, abdominal cramps, sweating, hypertension, tachycardia and a feeling of impending doom.

A feeling of impending doom. Oh boy, as symptoms go that really sounds like a barrel of laughs.

The Irukandji is dangerous and unpleasant, but only one of a dozen scary toxic creatures that inhabit these waters. It is one of Nature’s cruel ironies that the beautiful blue seas off the coast of Queensland are filled with some of the most dangerous creatures on the planet. When the mercury rises, it seems that being denied the respite of the cool azure sea is an almost certain proof of the non-existence of a benign God.

Only a total bastard would pull a trick like that.

Of course, such trivial measures would never stop a pirate.

Today in the suburb of Cromer in Sydney’s northern beaches, in terrible hot, windy and dry conditions, a bushfire is burning out of control. It is almost certain that the fire was deliberately lit. Every year in Australia, a significant percentage of our devastating bushfires are purposely started, for inexplicable reasons, by idiots.

On tonight’s news this exchange took place between the ABC newsreader and the New South Wales Rural Fire Chief, Commissioner Phil Koperberg:

Newsreader: Commissioner Koperberg, do you find it surprising that someone was lighting a fire under these conditions?

Commissioner Koperberg: Yes, I do. These conditions provide an exceptionally bad fire risk and fires start easily and spread quickly.

This is how it should properly have gone:

Newsreader: Commissioner Koperberg, do you find it surprising that someone was lighting a fire under these conditions?

Commissioner Koperberg: No I don’t. People are moronic and thoughtless and don’t possess even an ounce of common sense. It’s happened every year for decades and I predict that these cretins are likely to be doing it for decades to come.

It never surprises me these days, and I know that Commissioner Koperberg has a lot more experience in this field than I do.

As much as I love living in this country, there’s no getting away from it: our political landscape is just one big petty no-holds-barred squabble for the attention of the stupid uneducated voter.

Consider the new proposal put forward toward today by the increasingly desperate and pathetic Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley: Australia should require visitors to complete an ‘Aussie Values’ Statement before they can get into The Wide Brown Land.

This from the head of the political party for which I have voted for most of my adult life.

I cringe in embarrassment.

Some of the ‘Aussie Values’ that Mr Beazley and his cronies have somehow settled on with no consultation at all with Aussies such as myself are: “Respect for different religions and cultures, for the equal treatment of women, and for hard work and respect for Australia’s institutions, including its democracy, laws, courts, parliaments, armed forces and police“.

OK, let’s see. ‘Respect for hard work‘?* You’d have to throw out half the people who are already here. ‘Respect for the parliament’? I lost that years ago.

Way to go Mr Beazley. Maybe just to completely clarify our status to the rest of the world each of us should hang a sign around our necks saying ‘Yokel’.

And ‘respect for different religions and cultures’ should have appended ‘as long as they’re not the indigenous aboriginal population’, surely?

What this is all about, of course, is keeping the flickering flame that is the Fear of Terrorism alive in the Australian psyche. Because everyone has learned that the way to get elected these days is to Cut Interest Rates and Keep Our Country Safe From Terrorism!

So, all you terrorists, you just better watch out, because next time you try getting into our Fair Country, you might have to get past a form like this:

UPDATE: After a full day of this on the news, I am even more embarrassed. I feel I have to say that I unreservedly apologize to people of other cultures who find this idea offensive. Even though I’ve made fun of it, I don’t find it funny at all and I am deeply ashamed to be a part of a society who has these kinds of small-minded thoughts.
___________________________________________________________________________

* Although I suppose technically you could respect it without actually doing it.

Y’know, sometimes the modern world is just so bizarre that you really hope someone must be having a good ol’ chuckle at someone else’s expense.

Take the case of mobile phone manufacturer Mobiado, teaming up with perfume company Bissol to create Bissol No. 919 a ‘fragrance for the luxury mobile phone user‘.

WTF?

I don’t think I could have dreamed up that concept in my wildest moment of sarcastic surrealism.

Here, from the press release:

No. 919 is a clean, fresh, youthful scent with top notes of mandarin, juniper berry, elemi; middle notes of white musk, bamboo, oakmoss; and base notes of vanilla, cedarwood, sandalwood. (Mobiado Limited Edition) also has a special addition of Australian lime note, formulated for the elegant mobile phone user.

How is it that Australian Lime, whatever that might be*, bestows some extra power on elegant mobile phone users, whatever they might be?† What the hell is a ‘luxury mobile phone user’ anyway, for that matter?

There certainly is a very strong smell through all of this alright: something like a base-note of fish with a pungent lingering odour of bullshit…
___________________________________________________________________________

*Most likely, this is a species of Queensland lime called the ‘Gympie (pron: ‘gimpy’) Lime’ which possibly explains why Bissol has opted for the more general description ‘Australian’

†I guess from now on, at least, we’ll be able to spot them by their smell

The biggest scandal since Mrs McIntosh served the Archbishop raspberry lamingtons at Lent.