History of 'Australia'

My name is Thor Prohaska and this is the story of why I decided to 'improve' the national anthem.

In early 2001 my partner's son came home from school and asked his mother and I if we could teach him the Australian national anthem. Neither of us knew it so we downloaded a copy from the Internet. We tried teaching him the words but as 6 year olds do he soon lost interest.

Anyway, several months later I was riding my bicycle home from the shops and started singing the first thing that popped into my head, which just happened to be 'Advance Australia Fair' . However, I could only remember the first few lines. I thought to myself that I should know the words to the national anthem

When I arrived home I set about learning it. As I became more familiar with the words I found that a lot of them, to quote my partner's son, 'didn't feel good'. It was then that I decided that I wanted a national anthem where all the words did 'feel good'.

In getting to this point I have asked numerous Australians for their thoughts on each version. As a result the current version of 'Australia' is already a combined effort. This undertaking took several months, evolving through 12 different versions.

As it happend there was also another thing that I wanted and that was to be able to have my say about issues that I cared about. So I thought that if every Australian was asked what they thought about the new version then in the process of asking them a national network could be established that would allow every Australian, either directly using the internet, or indirectly via a representative, to have their say about, and contribute resources to, any issue they cared about.

To this end I have developed a plan to make this happen. I hope that there are enough Australians who can see the merit of this idea who will join together 'to make this dream come true'. Update: 8/7/2010 - The plan has been a failure so to quote the 'Little Red Hen', "Then I will do it myself", and I did and it is called The VoteWrap Method

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