Geoffrey Blainey

Identity politics

In the past half century, much ingenuity and humdrum effort has gone into redefining Australia as a nation.

In the past half century, much ingenuity and humdrum effort has gone into redefining Australia as a nation. Politicians, intellectuals and advertisers have joined in the game of searching or ‘yearning for an identity’. The phrase ‘national identity’, now a bit boring, arrived only in the 1950s.

In their thoughtful book, James Curran and Stuart Ward argue that this game was inspired by the global decline of Britain, the withdrawing of British forces from Asia, the coupling of Westminster with the European Union and the feeling that Australians were becoming ‘abandoned Britons’. It should be added that Australia was also abandoning Britain. The dramatic swing in Australian trade from Britain to Japan was far advanced when the long Menzies era ended in 1966.

Certainly, Gough Whitlam’s victory for Labor in the 1972 federal election tested the nation’s British symbols. ‘God Save the Queen’ was already widely challenged as the national anthem before Whitlam wittily queried ‘the musical tastes of George II’. An anthem committee was convened, entries were invited, but the six best were finally dismissed as not worth singing.

Whitlam then tried out four existing anthems in a plebiscite of 60,000 voters. ‘Advance Australia Fair’, written in 1878 and ideal for a brass band of that era, was the clear winner. The new anthem was played on Anzac Day 1974, but most of the State premiers were not enthusiastic. The Anzac ceremony in Perth even designated ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as the national anthem.

After Malcolm Fraser toppled Whitlam in the federal election of 1975, he set up another anthem poll. Though Fraser and Whitlam were locked in combat, they united in supporting ‘Waltzing Matilda’, a song which one scoffer called ‘the sheep-stealer’s anthem’. Alas, it won only 28 per cent of the public’s vote.

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