“Australia Day is, of course, an artificial fabrication designed by governments, the corporate world, media, Australia Day Councils and smug Anglo-Saxons to ensure that we forget real history.
“That Anglo-Saxon smugness is a resilient child of hypocrisy and racism. The mawkish jingoism, the noisy triumphalism and trumped-up nationalism lead to the xenophobia that treats our humanity as something special and beyond the humanity of others who are not of these shores or of those, the original owners, who live within our shores but have been relegated as relics of history, beyond imagination.”
Thus spake Peter Gebhardt in the Sydney Morning Herald, 26/1/2012.
There is nothing new in Gebhardt’s 2012 views. On Australia Day 2011 he was busy denouncing White Australians as “the usurpers” on this continent, and deriding our constitutional monarchy as dependence on “the regal pantomine in England”. (Note that he wrote “England”, not even “United Kingdom”: such is the strength of his Anglophobia.)
Gebhardt is a retired judge of the County Court of Victoria. Before that he was headmaster of Geelong College for 10 years, “leaving the school in 1985 after a disagreement with the school council” (according to The Age, 2/6/2003). He now writes books of poetry, sometimes illustrated by and introduced by Aborigines.
It therefore goes without saying that Gebhardt is a darling of the Anglophobic Age/SMH/ABC crowd. If he had slandered any other ethnic group with a negative adjective such as “smug”, Gebhardt would have been roundly denounced by those who currently praise him. Alas, it seems that in today’s Australia, putting the boot into Anglo-Saxons is a sure path to praise in certain circles.
Here is an extract from one of Gebhardt’s Anglophobic poems:
Forget the ancestral trespassers,
The heritage forbears,
The gin and bitters people,
They didn’t ask,
They just used their guns
Across the waters,
Across the sands,
Across the plains,
Across the hills.
No decision-time then,
As the map was bloodied
To imperial pink.
In this bit of trite racial hatred, Anglo-Saxons are depicted as “trespassers” and alcoholic murderers. We will leave it to readers to decide on this work’s poetic merit – if any.