No, mate, It’s MY country you Bogan Fuckwit.

Renae Jones posted on facebook

I LOVE A SUN BURNT COUNTRY..
WITH CHOPS N SNAGS N CHIPS,
KANGAROOS AND HOLDEN CARS,
I LOVE THIS PLACE TO BITS,
CAMPIN ON THE RIVER
OR SWIMMIN BY THE SEA,
AUSSIE AUSSIE AUSSIE
THIS WIDE BROWN LAND FOR ME,
SO CMON MATES
GRAB A BEER
A RUM OR BOURBON
AND RAISE, YA GLASSES HIGH,
AND GET SOMEONE WHO DOGS US,
AND PUNCH THEM IN THE EYE,
COZ IM A FLAMIN OZZIE,
ILL TAKE IT IN ME STRIDE,
DONT LIKE IT HERE THEN BUGGER OFF
COZ I HAVE AUSTRALIAN PRIDE

 11am Queensland time (my time), from somewhere near Adelaide
three likes

I respond:

“If it weren’t so bloody Australian to celebrate something of our bread-stealing convict past by robbing this poem, i’s get angry about you ruining it.” (sic)

After which i posted the original poem, two scathing retorts followed by the second verse of the National Anthem. Then I wished her a Happy Chinese New Year.

I should have said this

 

If it weren’t so bloody Australian to celebrate something of our bread-stealing convict past by robbing this poem, I’d get angry about you ruining it. Perhaps I’m being too kind.

Yes. Yes I am.

You do make me angry because this kind of ignorant shit isn’t as innocent as it is  awkward-funny.

The original poem is a gorgeous thing about being a hardworking open hearted grazier in the Outback. But you wouldn’t know a single thing about that because you’ve never lived through a drought or dug a single fence post, have you? Have you mate? Mate?

You can read it in all it’s glorious beauty at the end of this post, first I need to educate you on the National Anthem.

Let’s get this straight you stupid fuckwit. There’s nothing fucking Australian about racism. We’re so bloody lovely to strangers here. That’s why everyone visits, and shitloads of them stay, and bloody hero’s brave the fucking seas to get here on shitty boats from Indo. I’m a sailor, and I say anyone that tries that is fucking welcome at my joint.  We’re lovely to strangers here. This lovely: We even let pricks like you get around. This is why:- not because you fucking represent us when you tie a flag around your shoulders and belt some brown folk in Cronulla; We let you get around because you make the rest of us lovely folk look good. And, for sport, blokes like me enjoy putting you in your place when you dog our Turkish mates.

You’re sport. Not Art. Certainly not a Poem.

One of my pet hates is racism. (That’s an understatement.) I’d call you a crypto-fascist but, you wouldn’t understand the words, the academic or historical reference or, the dry English joke. So. Let me make this a little simpler for you, mate….  YOU, mate, can “Bugger off … cos I’ve got Australian Pride”.

People who profess Australian Pride like that are the people that don’t have any personal pride,  and with good reason. Shit poetry and worse insults get thrown around like dogshit, but one of the things I bloodly love is that it’s always done by people that don’t even know the Australian Anthem. Nor can sing it. Nor know where it came from. I consider not one a citizen of my Australia.

My grandfathers and great grandfathers all fought for this country, in the wars and after in the workplace, to make sure that even pricks like you got a fair go. They went to the other side of the earth to make sure some Jews got a fair go. They got jobs for Italians and Greeks and Turks. Because everyone deserves a fair go. This, mate, is Australian. And this, mate, is how their generation got about putting that into good poetry. It’s better than your ALLCAPS RACISM. Alot better. The second verse is the important one. This is from my Australian Anthem:

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We’ll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.

Do you know this by heart? Thought not. And you call yourself bloody Australian do you! That’s the bit of the National Anthem that isn’t in your head, or in your heart. I’m refering here to the ‘boundless plains to share’ and the ‘with courage let us ALL combine’.

Though it’s nice that you can find a piece of slang to express yourself (i refer here to the ‘Bugger off’ that could be removed from the poem with the last line, to make it perfectly fine), though it’s nice you can find some slang there’s better stuff around. Read Henry Lawson. Haven’t done that, have you? Mate? On your bike to the library then. Pick up the second volume of his Prose Works. You’ll have laughed and cried in the first 30 pages, mate. It’ll make you a better person, and finally, a better Australian.

So here it is, what we’ve all been waiting for, from a stockman’s wife called Dorothy–

The thing you stole and ruined, not just with your dogshit poem–to call it bullshit would lend it a dignity it doesn’t deserve– this beautiful thing you ruined with you ungenerous untested heart.

My Country

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze …

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

 – Dorothea MacKellar

My Auntie delivered that at my cousin’s wedding in Ireland.

It was well received. By the people that were left behind while we came here, my kith and kin, to this place that we didn’t like so much when we first arrived some two hundred and something years ago. They didn’t tell us to bugger off because we didn’t like it then.

Mate.

Now, let me get this final-clear for you.

It’s MY country you bogan fuckwit, and you should count your bloody blessings before you talk shit to every brown fella that you think doesn’t like this place well enough to stay. I say, it being my country, that anyone can come here. Guess what? I’ve got more mates than you and they agree with me. The new arrivals are more bloody Australian than you. Mate. They learn the anthem. Mate.

And in finishing, a poem for you:

Two likes for your post.
Just two.
THAT is what gives me Australian Pride.

I’ll think of you, your professed Australian Pride (and your French firstname) when I sing the second verse to my national anthem, at the RSL, this Australia Day.

Mate.