Somewhere on a Patio

Out on the patio (we’d sit)
And the humidity (we’d breathe)
We’d watch the lightning (crack over canefield )
Laugh and think: this is Australia

Sounds of Then
Callaghan 1985.

It is a fine thing that in every era we have our unofficial anthems to strike the right mood in each scene of the national action. Well may we sing “God save the Queen” and “Advance Australia Fair”, as we can also sit and watch, and laugh and think our own mythological Australia into the foreground.

Of all the unofficial Australian anthems, the “Sounds of Then” says the most about the lackadaisical utopia that was Australia in the post war period. This ambrosian lament, with its scenes of hazy heat and humidity, has become an enduring and endearing refrain on the popular airwaves.

But why does it resonate with Australians so well? Why is it so affecting?
Anthems are nationalistic bravado, victory songs and declamations of entitlement and belonging. But unless they strike a chord at the heart of the national psyche, and express themselves in a sublimely poetic fashion, they can become jingoistic, or merely descriptive. So whereas “The Land Down Under” was perfect as a victory song, with its national icons and celebration of the ocker conquistador, the “Sounds of Then” has a more reflective and atmospheric pitch. But what was happening on that patio?

“Out on the patio (we’d sit)”. Indeed we do sit. Quintessential Australia, forever reclining on location. The inertia in that laconic pose, that determined stance, on an essential icon of Australian architecture, the patio (deck, verandah): open spaces, rolling out or jutting out the side of weatherboard houses, cantilevered or supported; viewing platforms to look at what, if not the terrain and sky of an expansive and intriguing natural Australia.

But why did we sit? We sat because “we come from a land of plenty”: obligatory weekends upgraded to long weekends, institutionalized and held up as major gathering points, nodes of sandy munificence in weeks of secure work environments with perks and fringe benefits. We sat because we could, and in sitting we reflect, long sweltering reveries broken only by showers of torrential rain and the light shows of electric storms.

But what happened on that patio? We sat in a perfect slouch, not like a monkey in a tree or a cat on a fence or a lizard in the sun, but like a human ever sat, in a stillness and in wakeful silence, in a place at the centre of a vital universe, eternal, at home, secure, in Australia.

But what happened on that patio? The humidity would gather over the course of a hot afternoon, a precursor to a flood of water falling from the sky, thrown by howling winds at a sleeting angle, and trees would reach out, appealing to the heavens in a cosmic drama. And piecing through this maelstrom, We’d watch the lightning (crack over canefield).

And the humidity (We’d breath). Naturally placed in this habitat, we suck in that humid air, and thereby belong organically; we become a biotype, a species of here, overcoming our alienation, our European strangeness. We wake up and forget our past and with it our fractured displacement.

But why did we laugh? We simply laughed. We laughed an existential joy, free of extraneous cares. We laughed for the adventure of the new world and this Australian arcadia, on that patio where we sit.