Australia changes national anthem to honor Indigenous population

Australia has altered the lyrics of its national anthem to acknowledge the country’s Indigenous population, a change set to take effect Friday.

While the old version contained the lyrics “for we are young and free,” the new version changes the lyrics to “one and free,” in acknowledgment of Indigenous Australians’ status as the world’s oldest continued civilization, according to Reuters.

“We live in a timeless land of ancient First Nations peoples, and we draw together the stories of more than 300 national ancestries and language groups, and our anthem should reflect that,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Friday, according to the news service. “The changes we have made and we have announced today, I think, achieve that goal.”

Asked whether he would become the first person to publicly sing the amended anthem, Morrison quipped, “I think singing by prime ministers is the same as public exercise by prime ministers — it is best done in private.”

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian first proposed the alteration in 2020, earning the support of federal minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt, as well as Pauline Hanson, leader of the far-right One Nation party. 

The international influence of the Black Lives Matter movement has led to increased scrutiny of the legacy of European colonization in Australia. For decades, the nation has marked Australia Day on Jan. 26, the anniversary of the arrival of the first British ships in 1788. However, Indigenous Australians have long referred to the holiday as “Invasion Day.”

While around 250,000 Indigenous people lived in Australia at first contact, a combination of the spread of disease and over 300 individual massacres by settlers reduced the number to some 60,000 by the 1920s.