Australians All Let Ostriches

Happy Australia Day everyone!  I'm celebrating by sitting on my couch in Amsterdam at 2am browsing through holiday photos.  Andrew commented yesterday when looking at our photos from 2 months in Oz that it was a once-in-a-lifetime holiday, except that it's our home and it's always there and always like that.

  I'm proud of my country, and I'm proud to be Australian.  I think that Peter Allen's song will always express it best:

I've been to cities that never close down

From New York to Rio and old London town

But no matter how far

Or how wide I roam

I still call Australia home.

I'm always travelin'

And I love bein' free

So I keep leavin' the sun and the sea

But my heart lies waiting over the foam

I still call Australia home.

All the sons and daughters spinning 'round the world

Away from their families and friends

Ah, but as the world gets older and colder

It's good to know where your journey ends.

And someday we'll all be together once more

When all the ships come back to the shore

Then I realize something I've always known

I still call Australia home.

No matter how far

Or how wide I roam

I still call Australia home.

I realise that Australia Day is celebrating the arrival of the First Fleet into Sydney Cove and the proclamation of British sovereignty over Australia but I feel that Australia Day celebrates so much more, because we are so much more than an old penal colony where the convicts of Britain were sent, so much more than a country that is said to have started a little more than 200 years ago.  And once again, a song captures it best (Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton):

I came from the dream time, from the dusty red soil plains,

I am the ancient heart - the keeper of the flame,

I stood upon the rocky shore, I watched the tall ships come,

For forty thousand years I'd been the first Australian.

We are one but we are many

And from all the lands on earth we come,

we share a dream,

And sing with one voice,

I am, you are, we are Australian.

I came upon the prison ship bound down by iron chains

I cleared the land, endured the lash and waited for the rains.

I'm a settler, I'm a farmer's wife on a dry and barren run

A convict then a free man, I became Australian.

I'm the daughter of a digger who sought the mother lode

The girl became a woman on the long and dusty road

I'm a child of the depression, I saw the good times come

I'm a bushy, I'm a battler, I am Australian.

We are one but we are many

And from all the lands on earth we come,

we share a dream,

And sing with one voice,

I am, you are, we are Australian.

I'm a teller of stories, I'm a singer of songs

I am Albert Namatjira, and I paint the ghostly gums

I am Clancy on his horse, I'm Ned Kelly on the run

I'm the one who waltzed Matilda, I am Australian.

I'm the hot wind from the desert, I'm the black soil of the plains

I'm the mountains and the valleys, I'm the drought and flooding rains

I am the rock, I am the sky, the rivers when they run

The spirit of this great land, I am Australian.

We are one but we are many

And from all the lands on earth we come,

we share a dream,

And sing with one voice,

I am, you are, we are Australian.

So, I'm proud to be Australian with everything that entails, and I'm proud to call the great country home.