Australia: The Culture of Distance - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 296

Pumps, feverishly manned, kept the ship afloat until a passage through the reef could
be found. The Endeavor entered a small creek and was hauled ashore. Cook set up a re-
pair camp on its banks: tents, a forge, saws. It was two months of hard work, hunting and
foraging for food and keeping sometimes hostile Aborigines at bay. The ship sailed into
the reef again, this time through a passage that Cook had found from the vantage of a high
shore land point. Once safely out to sea, he came to “a fix'd resolution to keep the Main
land on board our rout to the northward let the consequence be what it will.” [262] It was a
bold gamble taken “in order not to miss the hoped-for passage” to the East Indies and the
voyage. [263]
AUSTRALIAN ODD BITS
Opals: Australian mines yield more than 90 percent of the world's opals. A unique gem-
stone, it flashes out a rainbow of colors caused by light moving through its hydrated silica
spheres. The town of Coober Peddy owes its existence to the 1911 discovery of opals. Its
searing summer heat sent miners and their families to live in underground burrows that are
still used today.
Sport: It has been many times remarked and only half in jest that sport is Australia's
national religion and that its days of worship are Saturday and Sunday: swimming and surf-
ing, sailing, horse and dog racing, cricket, rugby, Australian football, and the list goes on.
Organized competition brings out immense spectator crowds. Australians' love for sport
came early in its history, in part because the working class had more free time for leisure.
Other observers also suggest that Australians' love of beer owes to that same leisure. Aus-
tralia leads the world in beer intake per capita.
Waltzing Matilda: As a British colony, Australia took “God Save the King/Queen” as
the anthem played or sung on official and patriot occasions. With Commonwealth status in
1901, sentiment grew for an Australian anthem. “Waltzing Matilda” was a popular favorite.
In 1974 the government commissioned a public opinion survey, and “Advance Australia
Fair” won. Subsequent parliaments issued rulings that “Advance Australia Fair” was the
national anthem as long as no royal person was present.
“Waltzing Matilda” is the unofficial anthem. Its words, written by the newspaper man
and poet Banjo Patterson in 1895, celebrate a swagman (hobo) who took his belongings (in
a rucksack, a “matilda”) on a walkabout. The song is a lament; when the swagman steals a
sheep and is confronted by police, he leaps into a pond: “You'll never catch me alive said
he / And his ghost can be heard as you pass by that billabong / You'll come a waltzing
Matilda with me.” It is the world's only anthem, says Robert Hughes, that celebrates hard
times and death.