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Is there anything that says AUSTRALIA more than a little bloke chomping down on broccoli and potato? I doubt it!
For the title of the previous post, I decided to run with the very famous observation of Samuel Johnson, but in reality, I am inclined to to agree with Ambrose Bierce's observation some century or so later:
In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit that it is the first.
The idea of being intensely proud of one's country is always one that has interested me. Now, I like Australia, a lot. I think that it is the best place to live in the world. I think that we have the best food, (plenty of) the best looking sheilas, the best beaches, the best sharks, crocs and easily the best poisonous biting and stinging things. So, you know, we've a lot of things to be proud of.
But what we've seen appear is a sort of oddly quixotic yobbishly passionate/cloyingly sentimental nexis that renders itself in an attachment to a dud flag (as seen in the wealth of Chinese-made stick on tattoos, face paint, head scarves, bikinis, thongs, stubbie holders and battery-operated hand held fans), an even worse national anthem ("girt by sea...") and (clearly worst of all) the ridiculous and repetitive chanting of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie... Oi, Oi, Oi" (some way short of Rupert Brooke, one must admit).
As I hinted at in the previous post, this decidedly unattractive feature appeared to have emerged since the emergence of Mr Howard as PM. Now, although said PM encouraged it, I suspect that the orgy of fireworks, the fashionable abominations that were Ken Done doona covers, Jenny Kee jumpers and Olivia Neutron Bomb's Koala Blue fanny packs [snigger snigger], and the putrid Expo '88 hosted in that that corruption capital, Brisvegas, really started it.
Yes, I think that the Bicentenary is the real culprit!
The problem with all this nonsense is that in defining the collective US, there will always be those ignorant and lazy (non-)thinkers who take the short cut by establishing a THEM, and going from there. Thus you get morons like those who ended up playing their stupid game of (Aussie) cowboys and (Lebanese) native americans on various Sydney beaches, or that mob of young men at the tennis the other day, who thought that the need to honour their little flags necessitated a little fracas. Nothing says "fight" like an argument over a decade old civil war at the other end of the Earth that was about another war forty years earlier that was about another war thirty years earlier that was about some treaties thirty years earlier that were about some wars two hundred years earlier and on and on and on it goes. Hang on, why are we chucking chairs at each other again?
Better we all just sit down, watch some tennis, eat some broccoli and get on with it.
[And to explain the mystery of the Bicentennial Medal, you had to be at school to score one, I missed out, of course, as I was sick that day.]
Comments
I have a bicentennial medal lurking somewhere. I try not to think about it too much lest I get the "Let's make it great in '88" song in my head. It's been 20 years...how can it still be in my head?
Kids $%#@ vegetables $%#^$?! Mine hasn't eaten anything green in weeks. She's going to get scurvy I'm sure.
http://wattleday.com/1stwattleday.php
happy australia day, i hope there are many lamingtons, pies, beers and wading pools in your future
k
I really need to brush up on my world history **sigh**
I always thought that the lyric was "and men chunder". There you go. I hate that song though, a national embarrassment, just like the boxing kangaroo flag and jacket that Hawkie was wearing when Australia II won that race that no-one cares about any more.
I say that it is because they never had convicts.
Travelling in a fried-out kombie
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous
She took me in and gave me breakfast
And she said...
"Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover"
Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six-foot-four and full of muscles
I said, "Do you speak-a my language?"
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
And he said...
"I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover"
Lyin' in a den in Bombay
With a slack jaw, and not much to say
I said to the man, "Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?"
And he said...
"Oh! Do you come from a land down under? (oh yeah yeah)
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover."
Living in a land down under
Where women glow and men plunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover
Living in a land down under
Where women glow and men plunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover
Living in a land down under
Where women glow and men plunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover
Living in a land down under
Where women glow and men plunder
Can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover
Apologies to anyone who is not a Men At Work fan!!!