Girt by sea
By Allen Myers
A few weeks ago, I was reading some of Frederick Engels' correspondence and
came across an interesting letter. Someone was compiling a book of labour
movement songs and wrote to Engels asking his advice on songs to include.
Among other things, Engels suggested including a song about Schleswig-Holstein.
Schleswig-Holstein was a region inhabited mainly by Germans but ruled by the
Danish monarchy, and the struggle to unite Schleswig-Holstein with the rest of
Germany was part of the German national movement of the mid-19th century.
The title of the song was “Schleswig-Holstein meerumschlungen”. Even without
knowing any of the words, and without knowing the musical style -- it could
have been anything from a march to a folk ballad to a forerunner of grunge --
you can see it would have been catchy: “Schleswig-Holstein meerumschlungen”.
What I find really interesting about this is not Schleswig-Holstein but that
little word, “meerumschlungen”. What it means is “girt by sea”.
Now I have to make a brief digression here for the benefit of overseas readers,
to explain to them about “girt by sea” and the Australian national anthem.
Okay, the Australian national anthem. Australia may be the only country in the
world in which not a single resident can sing all the words of the national
anthem from memory.
Not even the prime minister knows them all. If you had to be able to sing the
whole thing from memory in order to stand for parliament, we'd have instant
anarchy.
Australia has lately adopted the US custom of making everybody stand up and
sing the national anthem before every sporting event. In the US, lots of people
know the words, and they sing them.
But in Australia, people mostly look sheepish and mumble a bit. They have some
famous performer out in the centre leading the singing, but it's really a
recording and they're lip-synching because they don't know the words either.
But everyone in Australia knows one line from the national anthem: “our land is
girt by sea”. So what people sing is usually something like “mumble mumble we
have Timor's oil and too many royals AND OUR LAND IS GIRT BY SEA”.
Well, obviously it was a bit of a shock, even for a new chum, to discover that
Schleswig-Holstein was girt by sea a good century before Australia was. But it
occurred to me that we don't talk much about being girt by sea, aside from in
the national anthem.
In fact, “girt” is not a word that gets much of a workout in our everyday
speech. It's the past tense and past participle of “gird”, as in “gird your
loins”. I'm really not very sure how one goes about girding one's loins, but it
may have something to do with wrapping a lamb chop in foil before you cook it.
Now, it's true that Schleswig-Holstein is really only semi-girt by sea, because
it's also girt by Denmark and northern Germany. But there are plenty of places
besides Australia that are girt by sea.
Britain is girt by sea. Ireland is girt by sea. Sri Lanka and Japan and New
Zealand are all as girt as you can get, but you don't see their people singing
“Mumble mumble mumble Our land is girt by sea”.
Indonesia is sort of double-girt, because it's all islands. Hell, Antarctica is
girt by sea, but you don't see penguins saluting and quacking “Our ice is girt
by sea”.
And why is being girt by sea any better than being girt by something else?
Okay, I know about the Sydney sewage outfalls, and it's not very cheering to
sing “Our land is girt by sewage”.
But when you think about it, girtness is pretty common: just about every place
and every thing is girt by something. Do you hear the Swiss singing “Our land
is girt by Germany, France, Italy and Austria”? You don't. Or Iraqis: “Our land
is girt by American bombers”. If I have a drink, my beer is girt by me.
It might seem a little surprising that in this age of globalisation, nobody is
writing national anthems about global girtness. Why doesn't somebody write “Our
planet is girt by space” -- which is mostly a lot of nothing, suggesting that
we ought to act as if we're all in this one place together.
There are at least two ways of looking at the sea we're girt by -- and I don't
mean according to how much sewage it contains.
In the past, Australians have tended to look at our sea-girtness as a sort of
highway to the rest of the world.
In recent years it's been seen more as a barricade, an obstacle that's a handy
way of keeping out people who are poorer than we are. I suppose this is why the
Labor government selected a national anthem with “girt by sea” in it: to make
us feel threatened by all the ungirt.
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