General de Gaulle once declared that all his life he had cherished "a certain idea" of France, casting his nation as a princess in a fairy tale or a damsel seeking rescue from a castle. One of the general's successors, Francois Mitterrand, scoffed at any such "idea" of France, insisting that he felt France viscerally and sensually, under his fingernails and in his nostrils.
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Surely a national anthem should combine those two forms of patriotism, gritty and visionary, two disparate ways of feeling and loving a country.
With anthems, dictionaries merely spell out banalities. They maintain that a national anthem should be "rousing and uplifting" and embody "a special importance". We need better definitions, ones which explain why anthems rouse and how they uplift us.
Normally, in a leap year, we could listen to the more outlandish anthems at Olympics medals ceremonies. A few sound like advertising jingles, others like nursery rhymes. Proper research, though, demands attention to lyrics as well as tunes.
For inspiration, play the scene in Casablanca when the clientele at Rick's sings "La Marseillaise", breaking down in tears, breaking out in applause, and utterly infuriating wicked, out-sung Nazis. That is an anthem at its best, used for therapy, defiance and unity.
Australia's own song offers few clues to what an anthem should do. Some lyrics are plain silly ("girt by sea"), others are factually incorrect ("golden soil"), while the second stanza includes ambitiously big-hearted promises to immigrants. "For those who've come across the seas/We've boundless plains to share."
For the moment, we might put up with its anachronistic wording; removing the Union Jack from our flag is a higher priority. In preparation for a change, though, let us consider other models, including ones to avoid.
First, we should never go backwards. Our old song, Britain's "God Save the Queen" is ludicrously bombastic. That anthem is a tribute to one person alone, not a country nor a cause. For the rest of us, the anthem presents a version of how Britain might be governed and protected which was out of date centuries ago. Confronted with the nation's enemies, when did a monarch last have the capacity to "frustrate their knavish tricks"?
Bellicosity generally is overrated. The French gladly sing a song written for ruffians marching to Paris 228 years ago, but would no longer honour its bloodthirsty commands nor raise a bloodstained banner. Few Lao might otherwise denounce imperialists and traitors, as they are exhorted to do in their anthem. The Irish have largely forgotten the past defeats "mid cannon's roar and rifles' peal" honoured in "The Soldier's Song".
Mind you, no national anthem is designed to double as a paean to world peace. Each country is meant to be virtuously special. "You are unique in the world, one of a kind", as the Russians sing and all of us think. Only the Italians have enough wit to include an element of self-deprecation, when their anthem concedes that "we have been for centuries stamped on and laughed at". Ireland's does celebrate foreigners, freedom fighters who "have come from a land beyond the waves", assuming they arrive gun in hand and Anglophobia in mind.
Surely a bit of nudging towards productive communal endeavour is called for. All the team played well - and will again - has to be the moral of the story. As Brazil's song urges, "and now, for good, let us keep moving boldly ahead". If you are Russian, you are admonished to learn not from Putin but from "popular wisdom given by our forebears". In India, the country itself is given embodied form: "you are the ruler of the minds of all people". Otherwise, history is simply rewritten as fodder for all that "moving boldly ahead".
The exception comes where you might expect triumphalism. "The Star-Spangled Banner" ends not with rousing uplift but with a heartfelt, unanswered question. "Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave/O'er the land of the free/And the home of the brave?" Who knows the answer, at least until the first Tuesday in November. To be fair, the United States does have some gorgeously tuneful and triumphal encores to hand, whether "God Bless America" or "America the Beautiful".
Turning to God, some quite odd jobs are reserved for Him in national anthems. The Swiss "pray to God, to Him surrender". New Zealanders also leave the hard yards to the divinity: "God defend our free land". More ambitiously still, the "Lord" (a broad-church designation) is called upon not just to protect South Africa but to intervene in all its conflicts.
Cultural dental-flossing could do us good. We and Canada have replaced dated, sexist language, substituting "Australians all" and "all of us" for references to "sons".
Other countries have treated their anthems as works in progress. Germany has retained Haydn's tune while air-brushing allusions to "Germany above everyone". China converted to "The East is Red" before returning to an original anthem. That, with a note of menace, commits the country to "build a new Great Wall". South Africa blended five languages into one song, with the good sense to place the haunting Xhosa melody at the start. Russia repeatedly censored and modified its national song, after having abandoned the one great cosmopolitan anthem, the "Internationale".
A model anthem might be shorn of God, smugness, history and chauvinism, encouraging us to care for and about each other. We can do better together, that would do.
- Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.
