Related: I was six years old when I (along with all of my classmates) finally discovered that the Australian national anthem didn’t actually begin with “Australians all are ostriches…”.
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The entire song was scrambled; I figure that at some point in the past some students had done it deliberately, but then those lyrics had been passed on to the incoming kids without anyone telling them that it was a joke.
It’d probably been going on for years; when the teachers finally realised, there was a school-wide remedial anthem class. I wish I’d had the foresight to record the whole thing.
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I found that post to be a breath of fresh air.
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To paraphrase the movie Amadaeus, “When one reads a headline like this, what can you say but Doctorow?”
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“Australians all let us rejoice”, for those who are wondering
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You mean, it’s not “I come from a land din under”?
That is so funny, so precious!
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We actually live in a small town called Girt-By-Sea. But they don’t put it on the maps, coz it would get real crowded.
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That one is sung by a Scot, incidentally. 
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“One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all…”
Well, until somebody decided to bring “under god” into it…since, if you don’t buy into that part, indivisibility, liberty, and justice aren’t guaranteed.
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…which tended to raise the classic primary school puzzler of “who the fuck is Girt?”.
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Colin Hay. Scottish by birth, Australian by everything else.
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He is an Aussie these days, yeah (he moved here at 14). But he’s an Aussie who, to an Australian ear, still sounds like he’s fresh out of Glasgow.
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“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere
in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
– Bill Watterson, “Calvin and Hobbes”
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Which one? There’s the main one they play at the Olympics and other formal ceremonies but I’ve also heard all of the following called “the unofficial Australian national anthem”:
-Waltzing Matilda
-I Still Call Australia Home
-Home Among The Gum Trees
-True Blue
Oddly enough Land Down Under is one I haven’t heard called that but it’s been a while since I hung out with Aussies.
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That one’s not so much “anthem” as “song sung by drunk Australians while disgracing the nation at an overseas war memorial”.
My personal “peak Oz” song would have to be this one:
I get that stuck in my head on permanent loop every time I take the bike out to the desert.
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One makes money and the other spends money.
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I suppose there are worse places to sound fresh out of…
Sung by an Irish man?
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They both spend money. The Christians who eventually came to dominate American politics just spend it on things like ridiculously bloated military budgets instead of social welfare programs.
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