The song “I Am, You Are, We Are Australian” paints a far more positive image of Australia, of a country where all its cultural, religious, political and individual differences are put aside voluntarily by everyone so as to achieve a community of peace, harmony and all the other good things communal spirit hopes to bring. Hah.
The song proceeds in a semblance of chronological order, beginning from the ‘dreamtime’ of the Aboriginals who believe it is from then onwards they were created to the arrival of the white people onboard prison ships to recent – and not so recent – local culture and finally to the ‘spirit’ of the land itself. Very nice underlying message, and now on to my thoughts.
The common pattern throughout the entire song is how almost every verse ends with “I am Australian”. This is no doubt used to suggest to anyone who happened to be listening to the song that Australia is all one big happy family. It does its job quite well, but some of its contents are exaggerations, especially the part of the chorus where it says ‘from all the lands on earth, we come’. Only the Aborigines and the white settlers are clearly and definitely mentioned. A passing implication of the presence of Chinese was in the line ‘I'm the daughter of a digger who sought the mother lode.’ The Chinese were indeed there when the Gold Rush occurred in parts of Australia, but really, who else but a literary student or an otherwise insanely curious person would bother to ‘read in between the lines’ so meticulously?
Sad to say, the current attitude of Australians is not supportive of this song. I really wish it could be but self-experiences prove otherwise. Interestingly – or maybe not at all, really – it is only the descendents of the white settlers which demonstrate publicly their discrimination of … anything you care to name. There is an unspoken law buzzing around through the heads of people and around the air which says, ‘if you’re not one of us, you’re fair game.’ But not all of the whites are despicable individuals with a lack of depth of compassion or understanding whatsoever. There are many which exhibit characteristics totally opposite of mainstream attitudes. Oh yes, it has become so chronic I have labeled it mainstream. What is that to say of their culture, I wonder? How do you ponder and look at your own people when I say as much as I have now? But I digress.
These people, the exception to the rule I could say but there are far too many of them to be considered anomalies, are wonderful. They frankly could not care less what skin color you have, where you come from and whether you use a fork or spoon to eat your food with. They’ll talk to you and try to know you, even with all the barriers either we or our society have erected around us. These I cherish, though admittedly I don’t get along with some of them. But this, at least, is for a purely innocent reason: that we are too different in thoughts and personalities to be compatible. I would honestly rather people hate me for my mindset than for my origins. That way, they at least have reasonable grounds for feeling so.
