On “Australia Day” many Australians project yobboish nationalism and drape themselves in the flag US-style, while the self-appointed elite sneer at the ‘bogans’ and ‘bevans’. Yet elitism is another form of the purulent racism with which Australia is infested, a miasm from the colonial aristocracy with roots in British class structure along with a more recent infection from the US ‘Me, me, me’ consumerist culture which values money, power and capitalist competition over community and cooperation.
At my place, we think of Australia Day as Invasion Day, the anniversary of the day our indigenous people saw white sails on the horizon, bringing Little England and its vapid social class structure, filthy diseases and other introduced species and destructive agricultural methods. This is my poem/song about the colonialists’ invasion of Australia.
Blow the Winds
Five years gone since my mate left home
he purchased his ticket to slavery
consigned him to another land
to wait for me in purgatory.
His pretty girl cried silken tears
sent to the gallows with cotton in her ears
they said she lied by the Rule of Law
born and bred a gypsy woman.
I’ll be going now, and I’ll see you soon
Sailing beneath the rising moon,
I’ll look for you in Melbourne town,
and there’s never been a heart so torn.
I stole an heiress in a field one morn
My heart’s in tatters and my hopes are gone,
In 1825, cold and wet and barely alive
I miss my woman and the babes she’s borne,
Fated to hang by a weeping judge,
Now sailing on the winds of scorn.
Blow the winds and fill the sails
take us to hell in New South Wales
The hulks are full in England
with many more like me
Bound to be Australians
with ironclad guarantees.
Me life’s not me own, I’m a Government man,
don’t remember when me term began,
the squatter’s chains rattle in me bones
to please the whims of the English throne.
Thrown into the white man’s cell
for laughin’ late and givin’ ‘em hell,
grabbed by the coppers, ripped from the land
no white fella can understand.
In 1985 another Murri suicides,
and there’s plenty more in Australia
of scoundrels such as me
Australia would be better off
if we’d hung on English trees.
Jin Jirrie
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