We can still be “ONE AUSTRALIA”.

AUSTRALIA’s much-debated national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, has a chequered history dating back to 1878,when it was first published and performed as a “patriotic song”.

Composer, Scottish-born Peter Dodds McCormick conducted a concert band when singer Andrew Fairfax rendered McCormick’s original rendition at a N.S.W. Highland Society function in Sydney on November 30,1878.

The song gained in popularity, and an amended version was sung by a choir of (approx.) 10,000 at the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia on January 1, 1901. (In 1907, the Australian Government awarded McCormick the princely sum of 100 pounds for his composition.)

What inspired McCormick to write what has become our national anthem (with a few amendments to the original version) is best described by McCormick himself in a letter to a friend (dated August 1, 1913).

He says: “One night I attended a great concert in the Exhibition Building when all the national anthems of the world were sung by a large choir, with band accompaniment.

“This was very nicely done but I felt very aggravated that there was not one note for Australia. On the way home in a bus,I concocted the first verse of my song and when I got home I set it to music . Strange to say there has not been a note of it altered since. Some alternation has been made in the wording, but the sense is the same”.

Straight from “the horse’s mouth”, you might say !That’s where it all started.

History records several changes to the song’s lyrics (“developments” intended to alter the focus of the anthem in regard to gender neutrality and Aboriginal Australians, it is claimed) since McCormick first penned his lyrics in 1878 (reports on this are lengthy).

“God Save the King/Queen” reigned as Australia’s official anthem until the 1970s and into the 80s (marked, at various stages, by the usual partisan party politicial disputes ,over the anthem,that Australians have become accustomed to in recent decades).

Proposed as our anthem by the Whitlam Government in 1974, relegated to the status of a “patriotic song” by the following Fraser Government in 1975, Advance Australia Fair eventually became our national anthem (with modified lyrics and reduced to two verses, as adopted by the Hawke Government) on April 19, 1984).

To recognise the legacy of Indigenous (Aboriginal) Australians, one word of the lyrics was changed in January 2021. The first and second lines now read: “Australians all let us rejoice, For we are ONE and free”.

Warming and inspirational words, I think we’d all agree…. but have we ,as a nation –and more specifically have successive governments, over the past several decades – really lived up to the INTENT of them – or is everything about our political and governmental “systems” just all about perception, rather than the realities of life in OZ today ?

Are we really “Australians all” ….and as “one, and free”?. Are we really a society based, today, on equity (and equality) across all Australians irrespective of race, ethnic origins, cultural or religious differences ….or are the words of our national anthem “just words” to reflect what we’d like to believe of ourselves – and want others to think of us ? A bit more than just soulsearching is called for, in my view.

I believe there is a genuine desire for change, within grass-roots Australians out in our “real world” – away from the influence and impacts of officialdom – to give real meaning to our anthem, and our aspirations, by actually TREATING all people “as one”.