I remember going to sporting events (athletics meets, cricket) in the 1980s in a sleepy country town in South Australia (Adelaide, its capital). Most of the time no anthem would be played – everyone I knew (obvs not a random sample) regarded Advance Australia Fair with either ‘no opinion’ or some derision. Plodding, vacuous, nowhere near as catchy as ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (which is about a sheep thief). I distinctly remember occasions when being told over the PA “please stand for the national anthem” that there would be an audible groan, a pause while people looked to left and right to see what others were doing and people pushing themselves up and mumbling the first couple of lines (all most folks knew).
This, I thought, was ‘normal’ (in every sense). Australia in the 1970s and into the 1980s was beginning to question some of the myths. The ANZAC day marches were disrupted by brave feminists campaigning on war crimes. The myth of ‘terra nullius’ was being challenged (though the Mabo decision hadn’t happened). There was, I thought (and I could have been wrong – I was young and how do you measure this stuff anyway?) the beginning of a reckoning with what Australia WAS and the damage that what would now be called white supremacist ableist anthropocentric heteronormative patriarchy had wrought. Idk, maybe I am romanticising. By the mid-1980s though, there was already pushback (the refirming of the ANZAC myth with an expensive TV miniseries etc).
In 1991 I went to the US for a year’s study. Someone said “please stand for the anthem” and I was shocked. In a literal eyeblink everyone was stood bolt upright, and began belting out – “Oh say can you see…” A lesson in how nationalism/patriotism was properly inculcated…
I hadn’t intended to be living away from Australia for that long (but, hey, 34 years and counting). Each time I went back for a visit in the 1990s and 2000s I noticed that if I went to a sporting event the following
a) the anthem was DEFINITELY played, without fail
b) there was no longer any hesitation in standing
c) people knew the words to the wretched dirge (whose words were slightly altered to remove the “young”)
I remember commenting on this and mostly getting met with blank stares. Boiling frog syndrome, I guess.
It was at this time (and probably no coincidence, frankly) that “acknowledgements of country” (by white people) and – less frequently “welcomes to country” (by indigenous people) became a thing too. And most of the former were cringe-inducing. They were either resented as an imposition of political correctness, or – less commonly perhaps – regarded as “comically” tokenistic.
Where is all this coming from? I am about to read a paper about the (lack of) theories of change held by Australian environmental NGOs. I’ll be interested to know how much long-term historical reflection the interviewees are capable of. Most folks in the NGO sector, in my experience, tend to be in their 20s to 40s and bland/ahistorical.
But in my view, the key to understanding the failure of social movements and NGOs to mount effective opposition to the ongoing and accelerating ecocide within Australia (let alone the expansion of its thermal coal exports – as per Ketan Joshi’s video)
lies not in whether NGOs have an articulated theory of change, but in the wider collapse of civil society, and the success of corporate interests (especially fossil fuel interests, but not just them!) in insulating the state from “popular pressures.”
The easy person to blame for this (and he does deserve a lot of the blame) is John Howard, prime minister from 1996 to 2007. But it was Steve Waugh who got the Australian cricket team belting out the national anthem, and all that crap. It was Hawke and Keating who ended the Harvester Settlement and the Accord.
I do not want to romanticise Keynesianism, or the decades before neoliberalism. They were not ‘sustainable’ in any sense. But there was, I believe, an opportunity in the 1980s to take a different path. Instead, we got what we got – increasing inequality, immiseration, despair, ecological and cultural degradation, and the for those on the sharp ends of all this the offers of the short-term comforts of racism, sexism, flags and songs.
How do we get out of this? Well, nominally we still have freedom of speech, information and assembly. In theory it should be possible to create social movement organisations that support each other, force civil society more broadly to force the state to do its alleged job (‘the common good’). But even if that theory were correct (doubtful), the challenges in the way of getting to the sunlit uplands are staggering in number and type. Worst of all we don’t even have names for many of these challenges (see however smugosphere, emotacycle, potemkinclusivity, egofodder, cabron offsetting etc ). As Jimmy Baldwin said “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
I’ll close out with a repost of the poem wot I wrote just this morning.
“Progress” continued. We got some nukes,
Continued life is down to flukes.
Now the climate bites our ass
Having kids? I’ll take a pass.
marchudson.net 
Marc, I love it, “welcome to country”, standing for the national anthem and compulsory voting are all a facade, Australia (a country in which I have lived for sixty + years), has never created it’s own identity. We have always been a shadow of mother Britain or uncle America.
We took the wrong path in pursuing multiculturalism, rather, we should have pursued assimilation. Sadly, I doubt the situation can ever be corrected?