Be strong, keep ‘young and free’

Take the Marseillaise, imagining the children of the "father" land marching on, and marching on and watering the furrows with "impure" blood. Or the Indian one, which is addressed to a Hindu deity.

The Star Spangled Banner is about battle too, but addresses nationhood only indirectly through the agency of an early version of the Stars and Stripes flying over Fort M'Henry in 1814 during and after an English bombardment.

Other anthems are improbable for different reasons. God Save the Queen, set to a popular tune at the time, has a sense of parody with its triple rhymes "victorious" and "glorious", followed by the half triple rhyme (if there is such a thing) of "over us". Yet many countries of the Commonwealth, not just the United Kingdom, use this as their national anthem.

People sing these anthems, despite their oddities, and disconnections from the present, because they are symbolic and provide a bridge with the past and shared experience in the present. They speak of the experience of the nation, often encapsulated in one event. They are not treatises (or treaties), they are hymns, and just a little sacramental. They are meant to bring us together not pull us apart, but this requires effort on our part not to be pulled.

If nations are about community so too are football teams. And community requires compromise. There are 54 words in the first verse of Advance Australia Fair, so these footballers are canning the whole song because of less than two per cent of its content. Why not just omit to sing the one offending word, or more assertively, insert your own adjective?

Canada is an interesting case, as it effectively has two anthems – the French and the English. They're similar, but not the same, with the English version using the phrase "strong and free", and the French version being overtly Christian with a reference to the cross and faith.

Canada is bilingual, so has to have a French version. But in other countries, the anthem has been translated into minority languages, with the Stars and Stripes, for instance, having been rendered in German, Spanish, Cherokee and Navajo, amongst others.

I don't think anyone would have an objection to Advance Australia Fair being rendered into an indigenous language. Perhaps it could be sung alongside Advance Australia at the beginning of ARL matches.

It could be substituted for the "Acknowledgement of country", which even when it is delivered by an indigenous man like Jonathan Thurston, rings hollow. It reduces prior ownership of the land to a snapshot of what obtained when the European settlers arrived, tokenises Aboriginal culture, and represents separateness.

The tragedy of this event is that it reflects some deep and disturbing currents in our culture at the moment that threaten to derail the Australian project, and these young men have most probably been influenced by others with just this purpose in mind.

It is another manifestation of using mass civil disobedience when you can't win using rational argument. It relies on the majority of people being prepared to compromise with emotional blackmail, or just giving up and walking away in the face of persistence.

These same tactics are being used to further the call for an Aboriginal advisory body to parliament, and a Makarrata.