The Junto this week asks for an anthem for a fictional country.
It stirred a number of thoughts for me, rekindling my desire for Australia to have a better national and then remembering my curiosity about an inland state that might have been in that country.
A while ago I shared a passage from The Plains by Gerald Murnane, which I'd read because I've been fascinated by a proposal during the nineteenth century for a separate state covering the floodplains of southern New South Wales and northern Victoria.
In my mind I pondered whether it might be a separate country, one which addressed a fundamental issue in Australian history and had established a treaty with the First Nations.
It often seems incredible to me that Australia is the only English colony without a treaty, particularly given the projections for growing identification as Aboriginal.
The state of Victoria has been moving toward developing a treaty and it saddens me that the Uluru Statement met such a muted response.
It was with issues of inclusivity that I approached writing my anthem, as well as environmental sustainability.
You can see these themes in the lyrics:
Where the songbird has flown
from the start of time
in our hearts we know
we hold all humankind
through the night and through the day
love grows where we play
We’re the future of the earth
we live in freedom without fear
we cherish our pleasure
and hold each other dear
walking lightly on the ground
we improve how it was found
We learn all worth knowing
your voice can join our tune
we share and we receive
our land goes to the moon
with our words we give a lift
praise each other’s gift
Our future like sunrise
beating hearts like soaring wings
full of promise is our sky
in unity we sing
growing power with the sun
of the new millennium
hear our song in unison
we stand as one
After recording myself accompanied by my baritone ukulele today, I had an idea that a marching band could make a better backing track.
So I set about creating a MIDI track and ran those chords through Ableton Live's woodwind samples.
Unfortunately the baritone peeks through the vocal track in a couple of places.