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On Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the replacement of a word in the text of Australia’s national anthem in an effort to make it more inclusive to Aborigines and fairer to tell the country’s pre-colonial history. In the first lines of the hymn, in the phrase that until yesterday said: “All Australians rejoice, because we are young and free” (“We make Australians happy, because we are young and free”), the word “young people” has been replaced the word “one” and now the anthem says something like “Australians rejoice, because we are united and free.”
Advance Australia Fair is Australia’s national anthem since 1984, when it replaced God save the Queen, which until then had been the British anthem and of all the countries of Commonwealth. The hymn was written by composer Peter Dodds McCormick in 1878, when Australia was still a British colony (it gained independence in 1901), and was very successful as a popular and patriotic song. However, the hymn text has often been criticized for failing to represent or acknowledge the indigenous peoples of Australia and instead celebrates the Australian colonial period.
The line that defined Australians as “young”, for example, referred to colonial Australia, ignoring the island’s millennial pre-colonial history; but several other passages of the hymn had been criticized over time. Defining the Australian people as “free” was seen as offensive to Aboriginal Australians who continue to be victims of frequent episodes of racism and discrimination, while passages that allude to the country’s wealth seem not to consider that the vast majority of the approximately 700,000 Aboriginal Australians live in poverty and are supported only thanks to state subsidies.
– Read also: Man came to Australia many millennia earlier than we thought
Discussions to change or update the anthem had been going on for some time and had grown more intense in recent times, when, among other things, some Aboriginal players in the Australian rugby league refused to sing the anthem before matches. In November, the Prime Minister of the Australian state of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, proposed replacing the word “young” with “one” to talk about what was probably the most controversial line in the anthem. Berejiklian herself, from the conservative Liberal Party, had spoken of a “symbolic” gesture, but her proposal was welcomed by the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, Ken Wyatt, and several public figures.
Prime Minister Morrison of the Liberal Party announced the hymn’s letter change in an article published Thursday in the Sydney morning herald entitled “It is time to recognize that Australia is united and free”. Morrison explained that it is correct to recognize that although the Australian nation is young, its history is millennial, adding that he believes that “changing ‘young and free’ to ‘one and free’ takes nothing away, but adds a lot.” One of the arguments against changing the anthem was that any change would effectively erase a part of the country’s history. Morrison’s decision was also welcomed by Anthony Albanese, leader of the Labor Party, Australia’s main opposition party.
– Read also: Whose aboriginal flag is it?
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