Advance Australia
The program for tonight is very straightforward.
An acknowledgement of the land’s traditional owners by the director of the Jewish Holocaust Centre’s Community Relations and Research. An official welcome to esteemed guests from the president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria. A reading dedicated to the memory of the recently deceased president of the Jewish Holocaust Centre. A showing of a video of two now-deceased Holocaust survivors giving their accounts of Kristallnacht. A lecture on Australia’s response to the Holocaust from an international academic who has flown in to be here tonight. And a final summation and thank you from the new president of the Jewish Holocaust Museum.
And then there’s the last line of that program: National Anthem.
I won’t sing it.
I don’t sing Our Father, even out of politeness at funerals, and I won’t sing the Australian National Anthem, even out of respect for these holocaust survivors. I don’t sing songs that I don’t believe in.
The night commences and the program is underway. The director acknowledges. The esteemed guests are thanked. The memorial reading is read and the Kristellnacht video shown. The lecture is delivered in precise and uncompromising detail. The new president performs the evening’s closing duties.
And the director takes the stage again. He invites us now to stand. He leads us into the anthem.
I won’t sing it.
I won’t sing a song about having a country with boundless plains to share when an asylum seeker on a temporary visa was suddenly woken at 2am in his Broadmeadows dwelling a few nights ago, handcuffed, given no explanations, afforded no considerations, and sent to languish in a prison on the island of Nauru.
I won’t sing a song about rejoicing. I won’t sing a song about nature’s gifts. I won’t sing a song about courage, and combining.
I won’t sing a song about the fairness of Australia because Australia is not fair.
The first line rises. Softly. Shyly. Its singers warm up to the act. Their tentative, collective falsetto strengthens. With golden soil and wealth for toil, our home is girt by sea.
And then something clicks in me and I join them. I join the singers and I sing the Australian National Anthem with them. I sing the song about beauty rich and rare. I sing the song about every stage of the pages of history.
Because just as the Germans wrote the pages of their history, so Australians write the pages of theirs. Apathy. Abuse. Cruelty. Theft. Dehumanisation. Mass murder.
And loss. And punishment. And penance. And atonement. And kindness. And generosity.
I hear the sweet voices of these good people shaping the standard we ought to live to. The standard we have failed in the past. The standard we are failing right now. But it is the standard the good among us must always strive to reach and maintain if we are ever to sing again at all.
And so I sing it.
I sing the standard.
I sing to Advance Australia.
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