Australia Day

I went to see Father Bob last weekend at his Parish or Cathedral I don’t really know how the system works nor care, what a waste rather than preaching to the converted that sharp charismatic social activist is preaching to a brick wall (in some part) but the service was marred by the final hymn in preparation for Australia Day sung to the tune of waltzing matildas with classy lyrics like ‘our own piece of earth’ and ‘god given land’ ‘home of the Anzacs’ and other WW2 mentality sentiments to make you vomit. This was followed up by watching Today Tonight’s piece on introducing Aussie Pride to the school curriculum and the compulsory singing of the national anthem at all school assemblies.
Something I’m really passionate about is the abandonment of National Pride, isn’t pride a sin. An old lady shamed me for ‘walking out on Australia’ when I decided the service was done in the second verse of that craptastic hymn that neglected to mention traditional land owners. When I was being trained as a tutor for refugee’s I was warned off using the phrase ‘In Australia we do…’ Patriotism is a value like loyalty, a value that generally benefits the party you are loyal to and of no benefit to the vassal. Same deal with patriotism. It just makes politicians jobs easier that’s all. I’d rather have kids in schools forced to study as many different value systems as possible. Furthermore there’s so many negative one’s in Australia, like tall poppy syndrome which makes Australia one of the least entrepreneurial in the world.
It’s the precise patriotic national pride that is a subtle evil to emerge from winning WW2 which is the assumption that we were and always will be the ‘good guys’ as an allied nation. Yet my Grandma, proud War Widow can espouse opinions that Hitler would have been proud of such as ‘Those arabs come to Australia to enjoy our way of life they have to assimilate’ I really just think ultimately race is purely environmental and patriotism is a barrier to integrating nations. No two countries with McDonald’s have ever gone to war. That’s one thing that can be said in favour of globalisation but national pride is a glorified term for Xenophobia too often. I think the best thing about Australia is that it’s remote location breeds a harmless indifference that allows mateship to occur. The fact we don’t take ourselves so seriously that we actually learn the words of our anthem means we really shouldn’t be participating in wars we don’t and shouldn’t care about, because if you don’t and shouldn’t care your probably going to botch the job (Like Iraq) well maybe people should care about man’s inhumanity to man but they should care more than getting a hard on over ‘shock and awe’ and remember there’s people underneath those planes.
We should be one of those heroic coward nations, the mediators. I mean we had a retreat line that gave up Darwin to the Japanese in WW2, and we would have done it too. That’s worth celebrating. Darwinians slaving for the Japanese master race possibly would have generated more sympathy for traditional land owners and helped reconciliation along. More on that later.
At the very least balance it out with National Shame day parading Pig Iron sold to the Japanese military for use in attacking us, Mugabe Tasmanian indigenous genocide and of course Crocodile Dundee 3 just so we remember no nation is perfect.