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Post by pim on Dec 6, 2012 12:50:30 GMT 10
I disagree! I don't think AAF is at all creepy. However there is a line or two in the second verse that might cause our resident xenophobes a few heart palpitations if they only knew the second verse:
... For those who've come across the seas We've boundless plains to share...
I drove across some of those "boundless plains" this week as I drove the full length of Highway 32 from Penrith to Adelaide. And boy are they boundless! Problem is that they're pretty arid too!
It was a grand sight, though. All that sky, and flatness disappearing in a distant horizon. I'd travelled from Adelaide - Sydney via the Sturt Hwy across the Hay Plains quite a few times, and they qualify as "boundless plains" too. But as Hwy 32 becomes the Barrier Hwy and you travel west of Cobar to Wilcannia to Broken Hill, and onwards across the SA border and the 300 km to Burra (where the movie Breaker Morant was filmed) it's a case of "WOW!" at vastness and boundlessness of it all.
At least AAF attempts a description of the Australian landscape. I think as an anthem it's here to stay. People did, after all, vote for it.
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Post by pim on Dec 6, 2012 13:50:31 GMT 10
I like the Mackellar poem too Phil. And in a perverse way that makes me glad it isn't the national anthem. Songs that become national anthems become drained of their original meaning. For example take the German national anthem. Originally composed by Josef Haydn as the Austrian Imperial Anthem, it had been inspired by the English God Save the King so its originl words were: Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser Uns'rer guter Kaiser Franz ...which translates as "God save Franz the Emperor/ Our good Emperor Franz". When neighbouring Germany united under its own Kaiser they took the tune composed by Haydn and set much more jingoistic lyrics to it: Deutschland Deutschland über alles Über alles in der Welt = Germany, Germany above everything/above everything in the world. Which sentiments of course appealed greatly to the Nazis with their brand of national "socialism" which was in fact an extreme form of national chauvinism and racism. So after WW2 the original Haydn tune was kept but the words changed to: Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit Für das Deutsche Vaterland = Unity and Law and Freedom/For the German fatherland ... Which is about as boring as "Australians all let us rejoice ..." but it works. So does AAF. Leave it be, and allow Mackellar's My Country to remain the excellent Federation poem that it is. The first two stanzas are in fact the point of the poem and I'd hate to see the first stanza dropped. It's a description of the English countryside and as such forms a counterpoint, or contrast, with the second and subsequent stanzas which celebrate the Australian landscape. It's basically a young Australia finding itself and celebrating its own existence. It's telling "Mother" England that while it agrees that the English landscapes of "field and coppice" and "green and shaded lanes" are lovely, it's a foreign beauty: "I know but cannot share it/ my love is otherwise". And the rest of the poem then goes on to describe what that "love" is. So I don't want the bureaucrats and the chauvinists getting their hands on My Country and bowdlerising it. Leave it alone! AAF does quite nicely as a mediocre anthem that nicely fulfils a mediocre purpose thank you very much!!
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Post by jody on Dec 6, 2012 14:13:31 GMT 10
I am, You are, we are Australian.....love it, says it all
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Post by pim on Dec 6, 2012 14:32:49 GMT 10
Hmmm, a bit too treacly for my taste Jody, but there you go. Each to their own. AAF is here to stay as the anthem, I should think. There was a plebiscite back in the 1980s and Australians were given a choice of 3 candidates: 1) Advance Australia Fair 2) Waltzing Matilda 3) Song of Australia. Voting was voluntary, as I recall but you can't say there was no public consultation. Personally I voted for #2 but I'm not unhappy it didn't get up. AAF got up by a big margin, with WM second and SOA a distant and forlorn third. In fact SOA has sunk back into an obscurity that's so complete that I doubt that people have heard of it, much less know the tune or the words. So AAF is the official national anthem with an older song calling on the Almighty to come to the rescue of the British Queen as the Royal Anthem. It's played whenever Her Maj is actually present. Again, and this is a personal view, since the Governor-General is described in the Constitution as the "Representative in Australia of the Queen" then "God Save the Queen" should be played whenever the G-G is present. But that's a personal view because I happen to like consistency. I also think that because we voted back in 1999 to keep the Queen, that government correspondence should be embossed with the letters OHMS, and the Queen's portrait should be everywhere and not just in CWA rooms or in local government offices. But that's just my opinion ... And Skippy and Garfield reckon I'm a "leftie" ...
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Post by pim on Dec 6, 2012 15:08:22 GMT 10
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Post by pim on Dec 6, 2012 15:43:34 GMT 10
pim it is tiresome when people refuse the stop thinking the earth is flat. I will not be lectured to on tiresomeness and boring repetitiveness by this tiresome and repetitious obsessive. Not now, not ever. Besides, I can personally testify to the spherical shape of this planet, having flown around it. A very boring and repetitious question which deserves a boring answer. Here it is: I couldn't give a shit mate. More repetitious tiresome stuff so I guess I'll just have to go on repeating myself: I couldn't give a shit, mate. I don't have a problem with a god-who-metamorphoses. After all, wasn't it Voltaire who said something about God being a cultural artefact? Which means God is a construct invented by humans and therefore varies from human culture to human culture. I doubt that the Twelve Apostles would recognise the modern god botherers as followers of the Man that they followed. Mind you I doubt that a human inhabitant of the Judea of 2000 years ago would feel much empathy with the modern world. No, I don't accept that. I'm not disputing that children get raped and I'm not denying that it's evil, but I don't accept that the clergy who rape kids do it in the name of the Christian God. Anymore than I'd accept that a cop who is corrupt indulges in criminal behaviour in the name of the law, or that British cops who sold personal info about people to the tabloid telephone hackers did so in the name of press freedom. I say it! In fact I proclaim it! "God" is a cultural construct which is culture-specific. As human cultures change and evolve, and rise and fall, so do their "God" constructs. I don't have a problem with that. But this is very boring, Buzz. Give us a break from it, willya?? Huh?? Pretty please?? With sugar on top???
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Post by pim on Dec 6, 2012 16:17:14 GMT 10
No Buzz I don't think that follows at all. I regard Matt's biblical blatherings to be as tiresomely boring, repetitious and uninteresting as your own obsessive rantings in which you pose as a militant paleo-atheist with an obsession about the origins of monotheism. It was interesting when I first read it - and that was a long time ago - but let's face it Buzz, you might find a tune catchy and interesting the first few times you hear it, but if the tune is flogged to death then interest flags fast, and dies pretty quickly. I read posts from the different god botherers on the board and the God they profess to worship seems to me to be a culural construct. Matt's obsession with his own peculiar brand of political correctness, which I'd call "biblical correctness", is every bit as much a cultural construct as jody's "however I feel about it and who cares what the bible says" personal stuff - which is very late 20th century touchy feely do-your-own-thang individualism, don't you think? You are just as obsessed by "the Truth" as you see it as Matt is in his way. So in your version of "The Truth", because I see Matt's doctrinaire biblical obsessiveness as a cultural construct and describe it as such, you therefore conclude, as a paleo-atheist who is, bizarrely, obsessed about the origins of monotheism, that I must be an "atheist". Matt claims to "know" that his "god construct" is a reality. Just as you claim to "know" that it's all a load of cobblers and, besides, there's this obsession of yours about God's family tree. Interesting when you hear it a couple of times. But by now it's as boring as batshit. We switch off, Buzz. You killed it. Don't blame the rest of us. But me? Am I a believer or an atheist? Strewth I dunno! I believe the term is "agnostic", Buzz
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Post by jody on Dec 6, 2012 17:00:46 GMT 10
well said Pim.....well said.
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Post by Salem on Dec 6, 2012 17:57:05 GMT 10
Garfield I have been saying Creation and Evolution go hand in hand for years. Totally agree Jody, that is exactly how I feel.
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Post by Salem on Dec 6, 2012 18:13:22 GMT 10
I never got the 'fuss' over WM. To me, I find it embarrassing, as an Australian. I could never understand why any person in their right mind would want a song about a sheep thief who offed himself as a national Anthem. I mean, wtf message are they trying to convey about Australia with that? Seriously? It seems utterly bizarre and quite frankly, if I may say - classless and trashy - to have some sheep thief suicider song as an Anthem. Massive What..The......F8CK?!? from me. I like My Country the most (and at official events lets face it, My Country would flow seemlessly with the Welcome To Country speech from traditional owners who endured all those floods, heat and rains for thousands of years before we came here. It would just fit. I like the tune of AAF but the words are pretty dull.
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Post by Salem on Dec 6, 2012 18:16:48 GMT 10
Totally agree Jody, that is exactly how I feel. There's just one problem with that view... The Bible specifically states that God created Adam and inspired him. At once. There was no delay. Not a day; week; month; year; century; millennium; aeon. If you deny the written word of God in that instance, then you open a can of worms. Which other parts of the Bible are "wrong" and how do you choose which parts to accept as written, and which to take with a grain of salt? But I don't see how that negates evolution. I honestly don't. I mean sure God created the world, and Adamn and Eve. But from there they evolved. The world evolved. Continents which were once joined, became separated. Amoeba and bacteria changes even. I don't see how God CREATING conflicts with the earth and its people evolving.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 6, 2012 20:41:04 GMT 10
Then, accept that the story of creation in the Bible is wrong. Then, think about the fact that if one account in the Bible is wrong (even though it is supposed to be the infallible word of God) - how much more in the Bible is also wrong?
No that is hugely incorrect.
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Post by Salem on Dec 6, 2012 21:00:58 GMT 10
To be honest Earl Grey I am just not that deeply invested in it, nor can I understand all the scientific formulas and technical talk. I just believe that God created us and the earth, and we evolved (through whatever scientific technical whatever way) from there. Thats just my belief but I admit I've never really bothered to get deep into the technicality of dna structures. The minutae doesn't interest me.
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Post by garfield on Dec 6, 2012 21:56:14 GMT 10
The creation story belongs in the dustbin of history, along with the flat Earth Society and having Earth at the centre of the Solar System. And man made global warming
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