Forget formal religion, just keep on the sunny side of Life

For the long-time Canberran (and this columnist has lived in Canberra, becoming more deeply tranquilized every day, since before the Dawn of Self Government) a visit to Sydney can resemble Alice's adventures in Wonderland.

There Alice is one moment sitting bored on the riverbank (as bored as a Canberran bored by Canberra) when suddenly she tumbles down a rabbit hole (the equivalent of a Canberran tumble-trundling down the highway on Murray's Sydney Express) and finds herself in a world of stimulating wonders.

A visit to Sydney can take on some of the excitement of a visit to a foreign country, to a land where they do things differently.

Even the sun does things differently in Sydney; or can at least seem to when one holidays on or around one of the city's easterly-facing beaches.

Here in Canberra and from the best vantage points the sun arises, with only modest splendour, from among the lumpy hills of Tallaganda. It can sometimes even seem, with the illusion-serving help of morning fogs, to be emerging from the unprepossessing township of Queanbeyan. How surreal is that?

But I have just been holidaying at Sydney's idyllic Manly where every morning on the beach one was able to worship the sun as it came up out of the Pacific with an extravaganza of magnificence.

As it emerged above the horizon, its rays painted the vast expanse of the skies with fast-changing hues of 50 shades each of tangerine, of marmalade, of gold and of pink.

Coincidentally, in the days just before leaving for Manly, my online Lapham's Quarterly, its theme Energy, published a stirring excerpt from the 1350 BC Great Hymn to Aten. Aten was the sun-God of ancient Egypt.

It was reverently written by Akhenaten, a pharaoh and the husband of Nefertiti, the Taylor Swift of her times.

It delighted me (and seemed the spiritual thing to do) to stand on Manly's beach and with due reverence read the 1350 BC hymn from the screen of my 2024 device to the rising sun.

Some of it goes like this.

You appear, perfect, on the horizon of the sky,

O living Aten who created life!

When you rise on the eastern horizon,

You fill every land with your beauty.

You are beautiful, you are great ...

May your disk shine in the daytime,

And may you dispel the darkness as you cast your rays ...

Australia is increasingly secular, with every census showing an increase in the percentage of us (38.9 per cent of us at the 2021 census) admitting, wistfully, to having "no religion". But we are a quite spiritual people and so one wonders why it is we have not become (like so many great civilizations before us, including Ahkenaten's Egypt), devoted worshippers of the sun.

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I am a lapsed Christian now and tick the census form's "no religion" in sorrow and miss Christianity's God enormously. Might Aten fill this void? Sun worship has so much going for it, including and especially the fact that unlike the invisible and thus faith-requiring God of Christianity, it, Aten the sun, is so highly visible. All thinking people ask "Does God exist?" but the sun's existence is never in doubt.

But perhaps while Australians do so little formal worshipping of the sun, we do engage in oodles of informal sun worship.

Even as I chanted the hymn, Manly's beach had begun to teem with surfers, snorklers, paddleboarders and kayakers, with bikini-clad beach volleyballers, with all sorts of folks all giving thanks (albeit wordlessly, subconsciously) to the sun for making their sun-kissed lifestyles possible.

As these sun-illuminated weekend days unfolded and as Manly's splendid beach and promenade increasingly teemed with at-play beautiful, privileged, well-nourished, carefree first-world people, one saw today's Manly still living up to its famous slogan-legend (adopted in 1940) of being the suburb "Seven Miles From Sydney and 1000 Miles From Care."

This thought moved me to wonder if every Canberra suburb too might adopt its very own, defining slogan, a slogan capturing/extolling some quality unique to it. Perhaps when the Canberra Liberals are elected to government in the ACT in October and Chief Minister Elizabeth Lee gives each suburb the promised $1.5 million to spend on itself, a suburb could spend some of that money commissioning creatives to compose a suitable slogan for that suburb.

In this, some Canberra suburbs, those lacking in character and in obvious charms, will pose quite a challenge to creative minds. But if advertising agencies can create catchy slogans for laxatives, dog foods and underarm deodorants, they can surely think of ways of singing the praises of even the most nondescript suburbs of Tuggeranong and Gungahlin.

And anyway, perhaps suburban Canberrans should compose their suburbs' slogans for themselves. Canberra readers, your homework is to compose a Manly-style slogan extolling your suburb. If this requires stretches of your imagination then that's a good thing. If you don't use it (the imagination), you will lose it.

For my own leafy, exclusive, insular, inner-South, NIMBY-guarded suburb of breathtakingly expensive homes I will compose something reassuring and Manly-slogan-imitating like "Within easy reach of Civic [quite true, only 6.7 kms] but (thank goodness) way out of reach of the working classes."