The suggestion of Cameron Humdrum, as re-named by nini, (Wretched symbol of colonial oppression) about getting rid of the canton in our current flag’s upper hoist needs to be extended to other aspects of our Brit-biased heritage, such as:

* no more soccer-bloody-soccer, whether on SBS or anywhere else – boring Pommy game where the main excitement is burning down the grandstands, and no way should we let the “Look, mum, no arms” mob hijack the way we use the word ‘football’, either;

* no more rugger-buggers – no dinkum Aussie in our you-beaut classless society should go near a Pommy “Public School” game that boasts about its upper-crust connexions and claims special links with the god-botherers’ after life, even if the male-bonding of the scrum has a particular appeal to some;

* out with all other Pommy-derived sports like tennis, cricket, hockey, horse-racing, track ‘n’ field, lawn bowls, croquet, squash, golf, boxing, water polo, to name but several; that leaves us with Brit-free baseball, basketball and NFL – oops !!, or, preferably, sure-to-be multiculturally-approved petanque, boule, quintain, pelota, along with kabaddi, karate and kendo;

* can no longer keep calling the place “Australia” – the word was devised by a Pommy sailor;

* have to ditch English – obviously an indigenous language will be the goods; after all, if the Yiddish-speaking “New Israelites” could do that sort of thing in the 50s and 60s, surely we can too [even if, these days, making the Zionist Entity an exemplar of anything is just not kosher] ?

Out with trial by jury

* and change our alphabet to make it totally divorced from its Euro-Anglo-Celtic origins, perhaps with a government-sponsored search of the outback for a set of culturally-correct dot-patterns;

* out with trial-by-jury and presumption of innocence – maybe have a Committee of Public Safety made up of academics who reckon Sorbonne alumnus Pol Pot didn’t go far enough, or of intellectuals who once upon a time got free trips paid for by the Union of Soviet Writers/Artists/Whoever; or have His Verdant Greenness, Bob Brown, and a sensitively-harvested Board as Supreme Arbiters of Personal Ecological Worthiness;

* exeunt “Magna Carta” and “habeas corpus” – especially, expressed as they are in stuffy old Latin, a patriarchalist/proto-capitalistic/imperialistic/masculino-hegemonistic/elitist/Euro-centric lingo if ever there was one;

* forego funding hospitals, particularly those catering for Hobart trendoids: we need those zillions to spend on changing the side of the road we travel on [and the vehicles that we ride in] – can’t continue to use the side that Thatcher and her Tories drove on, can we ?

* same with all those Pommy place names – we need to set up several consultative committees with citizen-facilitator interface protocols to devise new names [and in our new alphabet, remember !] for every Anglo-Celtic or Pommy-sounding item of geographical nomenclature; bit of a shame that, with no money left over, however, it’ll zap any ideas on actually repairing the roads that link them;

* and what about personal names ? Surely none of us called Charles, Camilla, Elizabeth, Andrew, Philip, Anne, Harry, William, Edward, Diana can keep on breathing good Aussie air with those monikers: there’s a family in Korea, no, not the Daewoo one, the Democratic one, which does a nice line in Kims;

Out with the following Anglo-Celtic/Pommy bastards

* bloody Pommy-style comprehensive schools with all that curriculum diversity – we ought to have every kid in the nation turning over page 118 of their maths books at 11.07 am on the fifth day of the second month (can’t keep the old names, can we ?): after all, that’s how it operates in France, Singapore, Japan and China;

* delete from cultural data bank the following Anglo-Celtic/Pommy bastards selected from Michael H Hart’s The 100 – A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History [Simon & Schuster, 1992; ISBN 0-671-71171-7]: do we want our real dinky-di newly-liberated culture contaminated by memories of oppressors like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Oliver Cromwell [even if he was the Number One Republican of his day], James Clerk Maxwell, Elizabeth Tudor [even if she was Career Superwoman ahead of her time], Adam Smith, William Shakespeare [bloody Dead White Pommy Male with all that confusing “thou”, “doth” and “wert”], John Dalton, Alexander Fleming, John Locke, William Harvey, Joseph Lister, Edward Jenner and Francis Bacon – bloody Brits, better off without them and their “influence” !!

* other undesirable Pommy impedimenta: beer-drinking, for a start . . . . .

Makes you wonder, though, why fair-dinkum Aussie sheilas like Our Germaine and Our Kylie, along with Scribbler Pilger and Our Clive, not forgetting Our Rolf, and that pontificator who recently deigned to lecture us on Our ABC, spend so much time Over There, doesn’t it.

PS: Everyone knows that ridding ourselves of colonial-era place-names will be a sign of our Maturity and/or Independence. Or Reconciliation. Or whatever. And that an admiring world will be just thrilled, dahlings, to read about it on their Front Pages.

Now, Dear Reader, you might ask where these place-names are: King William, King and Queen Courthouse, Princess Anne, Prince Frederick, Prince George, Colonial Heights and Prince of Wales Island.

Yes, they are in North America; no, they are not Canadian.

You’d’ve reckoned that the people who’d fought against the tyranny of George III and Lord North would’ve had the Maturity and Independence to change all those royalist place-names, wouldn’t you ? Won’t we be able to show those Seppos a thing or two when our brand-new atlases hit the Main Street stores and www.books-R-us.com !!

Leonard Colquhoun, 7248