Avoiding clichés an uphill battle ... or is it a fool's paradise?

- Oxford online dictionary

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As a writer who prides himself on the painstaking avoidance of clichés (others may call my award-winning work "critically acclaimed" and "thought-provoking" but you will never find me using expressions as weary as those) I am very alert to the clichés of others.

And so my mind's cliché-detector pinged a lot as I read a report in Monday's Canberra Times of how the Canberra Liberals' Jacob Vadakkedathu, bedazzling his party's preselectors, has been preselected to be the Canberra Liberals' top Senate candidate at the next federal election.

His party is seeking to reclaim the seat lost by the critically underacclaimed and dislike-provoking Zed Seselja.

The passage in The Canberra Times that set my device pinging read:

"I believe in a thriving society built on strong families, vibrant communities, and a healthy environment. My vision for Canberra includes improved infrastructure that would place this great city of ours on a strong footing for jobs creation and economic prosperity," Mr Vadakkedathu was quoted as telling preselectors.

Here in an impressive feat of vacuousness Mr Vadakkedathu has packed at least 10 cliches (thriving society, strong families, vibrant communities, this great city of ours, etc.) into a statement of just 40 words. Is this ratio of clichés an Australian record? Was it this feat that so bedazzled the preselectors that they selected Mr Vadakkedathu?

What a lot of blancmange this is! Can there be anyone in Canberra who, contrary to Mr Vadakkedathu, believes in a failing society, in weak families, in dull and listless communities and in a sickly environment?

Do the Liberals need to hire a writer to help Mr Vadakkedathu with his public utterances ahead of the next election if he is to have any chance of wresting the Senate seat from the saintly David Pocock whose overall saintliness includes an avoidance of cliché use almost as awe-stoking as my own?

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But although I am mild-manneredly gnashing my dentures at Mr Vadakkedathu's clunking clichés, I am as a student of clichés, fond of good, vibrant, thriving ones. Some clichés are essential to some instances and occasions when original thoughts are jarring and inappropriate, when used, pre-loved sentiments are just what's needed.

Last week's Anzac Day dawn services were prime annual examples of occasions when clichés are indispensable. These services are rituals, and repetitions of phrases and opinions are essential to rituals.

My atheism, usually quite firm and substantial, wobbles and evaporates a lot during the always very, very Christian dawn service.

An atheist whose atheism is always thrivingly strong and vibrant (here let's imagine the CEO of modern atheism, professor Richard Dawkins) will think the dawn service hymn O Valiant Hearts a bundle of sentimental, fibbing clichés. It make-believes that there is valour in war and glory in dying in battle and that there is a sumptuous Heaven where the valiant dead are not dead at all but are sweetly content as they wait to be raised by a non-existing God sounding His trumpet.

There are about 20 clichés (clichés of Christian belief and of valour and "knightly virtue" in warriors) in just the first three verses of the hymn we sing on Anzac Day. For my part I can never hear, let alone sing the hymn (and I always do sing along with it) without finding my atheism eerily suspended.

Singing along with it this Anzac Day I noticed for the umpteenth time, how the hymn gets so much of its clichéd power from how the Reverend Charles Harris's deeply mournful melody seems to contradict Sir John Stanhope Arkwright's words.

Arkwright (and what a fabulous surname for a Christian lyricist!) clichés on about valour and glory and splendour and reverberating blasts of God's almighty trumpet but there's none of this in the reverend's grieving, heartbroken tune. It's not clear from Harris's melody (itself rather clichéd, but soulfully so) that he, Harris, was persuaded by the sentiments he was setting.

Meanwhile the address the breeze-swept governor of Victoria professor Margaret Gardner gave at Melbourne's ANZAC Day dawn service was refreshingly anti-war.

It had only a light sprinkling of the occasion's expected and wholly appropriate clichés ("This day of remembrance began in the blood, the bravery and the sacrifices that marked the shores of Gallipoli") but otherwise harped on the theme that whenever our warring species resorts to war, it, our species, shows failures, of diplomacy, of politics, of wisdom, of decency.

If there is a God, He will have noticed how Professor Gardner's address did not contain a single reference to Him.

But He, Almighty God, was not on the dawn service bench for long, soon bustling back into muscular action, first in the singing of New Zealand's national anthem God Defend New Zealand.

Then He took over, completely, in the choir's singing of the mighty, melancholy and magnificently cliché-rich hymn Abide With Me in which we (unless we are Richard Dawkins) beg God to be with us as the darkness deepens, as earth's joys grow dim, as its glories pass away.

These beggings are unoriginal thoughts and so according to the dictionary qualify as clichés, in which case they are clichés that have criss-crossed every thinking mind since (to use a cliché) the dawn of time.