1. |
Asylum Seeker
02:58
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Asylum Seeker 23/4/15 Keith Binns
To the tune of Wayfaring Stranger
1. I’m just a poor asylum seeker, in a leaky boat, knocking at your door.
I’m hoping for a friendly welcome. Please let me stand upon your shore.
Don’t lock me up just like a criminal. You know that I have done no wrong.
I’m just a poor asylum seeker. Oh won’t you listen to my song.
2. What I’m running from you can’t imagine, war and torture, rape and fear.
I’ve left my family, spent our savings, to risk it all on coming here.
Don’t lock me up just like a criminal. You know that I have done no wrong.
I’m just a poor asylum seeker. Oh won’t you listen to my song.
3. Weep, weep, oh weep for poor Australia, drowning in its fear and greed,
Failing to help the hurting stranger, despite the plea of every creed.
Don’t lock them up, don’t make them prisoners. You know that they have done no wrong.
They are just poor asylum seekers. Oh, won’t you listen to their song.
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2. |
Refugee National Anthem
01:31
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Advance Australia Fair Rewrite. Nov 2014 Keith Binns
1. Australians all let us rejoice that we’re not refugees
Escaping violence, rape and war across our girting seas
We said you’d have a welcome here in 1954
But changed our mind in ’92, compassionate no more.
It’s getting really hard to sing Advance Australia Fair
2. Beneath our radiant Southern Cross we’ll lock you up for sure
If you exercise your legal right to knock upon our door.
If in a boat you’ve crossed the sea we’ve got no plains to share
Just Manus Island or Nauru and bitter black despair.
It’s getting really hard to sing Advance Australia Fair
New Third Verse (not recorded)
3. So let's all raise our voices high and send the message clear
We'll welcome every refugee, we will not hate and fear.
This land has nurtured all who've come for fifty thousand years
Let's do the same and end the shame
Of what's been happening here.
And then in diverse strains we'll sing
And make the gum trees loudly ring
Inclusion is an Aussie thing
Advance Australia Fair
(With apologies to Gleny Rae)
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3. |
I Wish I Was A Sheep
02:47
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I wish I was a sheep May/June 2018
Keith Binns
Mary had an export sheep, it had to board a ship.
The minister got all annoyed, said that ship was bull…….
A little girl is bleating, in the Nauru rain
She is just a number, hasn’t got a name
If she were an export sheep, she would be protected
All she wants, just like the sheep, is to have her rights respected.
And she sings this little ditty, in the Nauru heat.
Mary had a little lamb, I wish I was a sheep.
Cos they care about sheep, more than they care about me.
Ag Minister angry, ads on TV
Why am I less valued than a load of mutton?
Guess I’ll have to ask….Peter Dutton
Live export sheep are helpless and they need protection
How much more the many children in mandatory detention.
How much more the many children in mandatory detention.
But we care about sheep more than we care about them
Why do we keep children in a pen?
What have we become to treat them so?
Where is the country we used to know?
We care more about sheep, much to our shame
Coalition and Labor are both the same
What have we become to treat children so?
Where is the country we used to know?
The kids on Nauru can’t rejoice, they’re young but they’re not free…….
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4. |
SIEV-X Memorial
05:05
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For the SEIV X Commemoration
Keith Binns 2021
Tune Waly, waly (Traditional)
So we say “Shame, shame, shame” for what was done
And we’ll fight on ‘till we have won
‘Till all who seek safe harbour here
Can live in peace and not in fear.
There was a boat and she sailed the sea
She was loaded deep, as deep can be
But not as deep as the shame we feel
That we were deaf to her appeal.
She asked for help, we gave her none
For an election must be won
Two Indonesian fishing boats
Rescued the ones that were afloat
So we say “Shame, shame, shame” for what was done
And we’ll fight on ‘till we have won
‘Till all who seek safe harbour here
Can live in peace and not in fear.
So now on land these poles rise high
And call their message to the sky
How long, how long will fear and greed
Keep us from helping those in need?
How long, how long till all shall hear
That love is stronger than our fear?
Kindness is stronger than our greed
Australia help the ones in need.
So we say “Shame, shame, shame” for what was done
And we’ll fight on ‘till we have won
‘Till all who seek safe harbour here
Can live in peace and not in fear.
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5. |
Twenty Years Since Tampa
03:04
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Twenty Years Since Tampa
August 2021
It’s been twenty years since Howard unleashed the hate and the fear
We will decide just how they come and who will come here
Letting us know that public racism now was OK
Just so that he would end up on top on election day.
Splitting the country in two, what an unAustralian thing to do.
We once were a land that welcomed folk from everywhere
Just like it says in the second verse of Advance Australia Fair
But now that’s all changed, now we’ve been taught to hate and to fear
Come here by boat and we’ll lock you up for year after year.
“Illegal” they say, but there’s a flaw, the locked up have broken no law.
Will it ever end, this atmosphere that’s grinding us down?
This feeling that we just don’t belong in our own town?
Because we’ve no place while four year olds are kept in a cage
And we have to deal with our own grief and our own rage
Trapped in what seems a foreign land, with no solution at hand.
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Keith Binns NSW, Australia
Keith has been a performer all his life, including ten years in professional music theatre. (including a Royal Variety Performance and contributing a song to an Academy Award winning film) and thirty years in children's entertainment. He now teaches children music keyboard, grows vegetables and is involved with refugee advocacy. ... more
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