We are one, and even though we're all sorts,
Even though we're polyglot and cosmopolitan,
We share a dream and sing with one voice
"I am, you are, we are Australian."
(Your columnist's vastly improved lyric of our most popular patriotic ditty.)
In spite of its banality (or perhaps in a funny way because of that banality) the popular patriotic song I am Australian (usually called We Are Australian) has just become one of the official Sounds Of Australia.
Recordings of it warbled by various artists, but especially by the divinely trombone-voiced Judith Durham, grace the National Film and Sound Archives' 2023 selection of our nation's quintessential Sounds.
I never hear the song without wincing at its several fake, lazy, half-rhymes, including and especially the chorus's lamentable rhyming of "and from all the lands on earth we come ..." with "I am, you are, we are Australian."
This asks us to pretend as we sing it alone in our showers or en masse in our choirs that the word Australian ends, like the words come, chrysanthemum, referendum, tweedledum and yum-yum, with an "um" sound. But it doesn't.
Can there be another song of patriotic national importance anywhere on Earth the singing of which requires its singers to mispronounce the actual noun that describes their beloved homeland's citizens? For shame.
It is all so easily put right, and because I am a verse and language pedant-perfectionist and a patriot I have put it right, serving the nation with the verse at the head of this column. Sing it through for yourself, noting how with just a little nimbleness of the tongue it fits the melody like a glove.
A wordwright, it all took me five minutes, on the way coming up with other versions almost as good as the chosen one rhyming the word Australian perfectly with the words mammalian, Episcopalian, bacchanalian, barbarian and extraterrestrial alien.
It has pained me to have to select only one of my versions, to put the others aside, but it would bewilder our easily bewildered nation to have to choose between them all.
And in this context (the song's sentiment that Australia is made up of such a mixture of peoples) the word cosmopolitan, one of its dictionary-defined meanings "composed of persons or elements from all or many parts of the world", is a perfect rhyme with the word Australian.
And now the song's chorus can be sung without making the nation wince. My work here, in the area of popular patriotic song, is done.
Meanwhile the National Film and Sound Archives notion of there being such things as National Sounds is patriotically exciting and sentiment-provoking.
MORE WARDEN:
Also on the NFSA's 2023 list is Robyn Archer singing her Menstruation Blues. It is a wittier, far more sophisticated song than the clunkingly sentimental We Are Australian but given its adult subject matter will probably never become, as We Are Australian has become, a staple part of the repertoire of piping choirs of pre-pubescent children.
The NFSA's chosen version for its website of I Am Australian has it sung by Judith Durham, reminding us of what a marvellous instrument the late singer's voice was.
Her mighty voice, mighty as a melodious foghorn, is full of brassy sounds and just as the great tenor Jussi Bjorling is credited with a voice full of trumpets, I never listen to Judith's voice in full flight (as it is in her I am Australian) without hearing something of trumpets, trombones and French horns. It is a testimony to the might and magic of her voice that she somehow makes a ditty as banal as I Am Australian sound as grand and spiritual as the grandest of great hymns.
Meanwhile, the NFSA having just attuned us to the Sounds Of Australia I find myself thinking, parochially, of quintessential Sounds of Canberra.
As I write, here in the wildlife-rich Bush Capital, my neighbourhood is alive (as it is at exactly this time every year) with the sounds of juvenile kookaburras painstakingly learning how to produce their species' hallmark maniacal cackle. It is touching and delightful to hear them, getting a little bit better all the time but meanwhile in their rehearsals making stuttering, stifled, half-cackle noises.
Meanwhile in the National Arboretum on a windy morning this week there was the unusually Canberran sound of the wind whooshing through the leaves of the Silky Oak forest (of the Grevillea robusta species), unusually Canberran because our arboretum's is surely Australia's only actual (man-planted) forest of these magnificent Australian trees, at the moment in splendid red-golden flower.
Their forest is a pageant at the moment, for the very, very few who ever visit it (I usually have it all to myseIf) easily the best show in Canberra.
Why am I, normally so intellectual and rational, being exuberantly, mawkishly pollyannaish about my city?
I think it is because the Canberra Liberals' cunningly miserabilist election policy of trying to get us to feel bitter about our city's blemishes, about its "neglected" look (the supposed catastrophes of unmown grass and pocked roads) is having an opposite, contrary impact on me.
That Machiavellian miserabilism is disposing me instead to count my Canberra blessings, naming them (things like being able to listen to baby kookaburras learning to laugh) one by one, marvelling at how very many of these blessing there are.
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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