'Advance Australia Fair is an anthem that is racist at so many levels'

Songwriter Shane Howard, who’s no slouch with words and melody, recently commented on social media about the latest furore over the national anthem and the defiant stand, sorry, non-stand, of Brisbane schoolgirl Harper Nielsen, aged nine.

“This young girl deserves our utmost respect and admiration. Certainly not our derision. Who is the mature thinker in all of this clatter? It's certainly not the adults banging on about how she should be chastised. Let's be honest. What she says is patently true and we all know it.

"Advance Australia Fair is an anthem that is racist at so many levels, written for a white Australia that is irrelevant, or should be. Apologies to the writer but it's also poorly crafted lyrically, is largely meaningless sentimentality and is a substandard melody. It's time for the whingeing faux patriotic grown-ups to grow up.

“For goodness sake, a nine-year-old girl just gave us all a lesson in truth and kicked our backsides to move forward. It's time for a new anthem and a new flag while we're at it. They had their time and now they're irrelevant. Let's move on.”

Howard, of course, is the writer of Australia’s unofficial anthem Solid Rock. His love of this country, of Indigenous life and culture, its history of survival, dispossession, resilience and faith runs deep into the earth.

It’s easy to dismiss the anthem incident of 2018 in a Brisbane primary school as a storm in a tea cup. A schoolkid finds it offensive to stand for an anthem that she says does not ring true. “When it says 'we are young' it completely disregards the Indigenous Australians who were here before us for over 50,000 years," she said. “When it was originally written, Advance Australia Fair meant advance the white people of Australia."