With the move coming up so quickly I’ve found myself thinking lately about what it means to be Australian, and who we are as a collective group of people. Like any kid that attended public school in Australia I had to learn the Australian national anthem (’Advance Australia Fair’) off by heart, and every Monday morning we would stand in assembly and sing the anthem whilst facing the Australian flag. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ means less to me however than other songs which seem to more accurately portray my own experiences of Australia, such as Bruce Woodley’s ‘We Are Australian’ and GANGgajang’s ‘Sounds of Then (This is Australia)’.

‘We Are Australian‘ is one of those songs that teachers are fond of playing for their young pupils to encourage feelings of acceptance and multiculturalism, and it’s a popular feature at children’s end-of-year concerts and at Australia Day performances. The chorus, one that sticks in the minds of those that have performed it themselves, encourages understanding:

We are one, but we are many,
And from all the lands on Earth we come,
We share a dream, and sing with one voice:
I Am, You Are, We Are Australian.”

The first verse of the song describes the Aboriginal people, who ‘for forty thousand years have been the first Australians’. The second verse illustrates the convict settlement and ends with the phrase, ‘A convict then a free man, I became Australian.’ The third describes the two World Wars, the impact of the Depression, and the feeling of being an ‘Aussie Battler’ through the bad times and the good. The two verses I love the best however, are the final two in the song:

I’m a teller of stories, I’m a singer of songs
I am Albert Namatjira and I paint the ghostly gums
I am Clancy on his horse, I’m Ned Kelly on the run
I’m the one who Waltzed Matilda,
I Am Australian.

I’m the hot wind from the desert,
I’m the back soil of the plains,
I’m the mountains and the valleys,
I’m the droughts and flooding rains,
I am the rock, I am the sky,
The rivers when they run,
The spirit of this great land,
I am Australian.”

The other song, possibly more familiar to people worldwide due to it’s popularity in the pop charts in the late eighties, is GANGgajang’s ‘Sounds of Then (This is Australia)’. Mark Callaghan, the front man for the band, wrote the song after he emigrated from the UK to live on the coast east of Bundaberg in Queensland. The song is a more tongue-in-cheek take of Australian life, and it seems to marvel at some of the occurrences Australians take for granted. The chorus could probably be recited by most Australians by heart:

Out on the patio we sit,
And the humidity we breathe,
We watch the lightning crack over canefields,
And laugh and think, ‘This is Australia’!”

It’s comforting to know that wherever I go and however far I travel I’ll carry these pieces of Australia with me… or as Peter Allen put it, “I’ve been to cities that never close down, From New York to Rio and old London town, But no matter how far or how wide I roam, I still call Australia home.”