Uncle Sam and Britannia: the character of Australian English

This is half a world away from the Pilgrim Fathers. We can see some of this contrast in our public documents. The Australian Constitution is sober, devout but undeclamatory:

Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established ...

Compare that to the American Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Or the even more rousing, high-minded and abstract Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

During the century and a quarter that separate these documents, and the nearly two centuries that separate the Mayflower from Botany Bay, English moved from the declamatory abstractions of the seventeenth century to the industrial nuts and intellectual bolts of the late eighteenth.

These patterns persist even now. Here is President Bush announcing the Iraq war:

The United States, with other countries, will work to advance liberty and peace in that region. Our goal will not be achieved overnight, but it can come over time. The power and appeal of human liberty is felt in every life and every land. And the greatest power of freedom is to overcome hatred and violence, and turn the creative gifts of men and women to the pursuits of peace. Good night, and may God continue to bless America.

We don't invoke God to underwrite our foreign policy, and we don't use phrases like “the power and appeal of human liberty”. We back away from abstractions, and are more stingy with adjectives and political flourishes.

For that matter, we don't have an Oath of Allegiance to be said in schools and on public occasions, and if we did, we would find it hard to find the right tone of voice. Our national anthem has a good tune but gawky lyrics. The closest we get to solemnity is on Anzac Day in Binyon's well known words of remembrance:

They shall not grow old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning,
We will remember them!