Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

We have a shocking revelation this week, on the cusp of the Rugby World Cup that strikes at the very core of our national pride.

The national anthem we sing before every match and at many official events, is fundamentally flawed; and hides a smouldering mystery.

For years we've been parroting off the words, a poem scribed by Thomas Bracken in the 1870s, but have you ever questioned, what we are singing about?

RR urges you to take some drastic action before the Rugby World Cup kicks off. There's also some serious implications for the pending re-design of our national flag. Let me explain.

The current anthem is very, very weird.

God of Nations at Thy feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices, we entreat,
God defend our free land.
Guard Pacific's triple star
From the shafts of strife and war,
Make her praises heard afar,
God defend New Zealand.

For starters, why is the God of Nations at someone's feet? Surely if you're God, you don't hang around the smelly jandals of anyone.

Really, the songster should be at the feet of the God.

'Bonds of love” sounds decidedly kinky. A national anthem is not the place to boast of your Bondage and Discipline exploits.

Missing star
The next lines are fairly standard, until we get to the most perplexing line, and this is where it gets twisted: 'Guard Pacific's triple star”. No-one seems to know what the triple star is.

Perhaps it was written on a cloudy night and only three of the Southern Cross stars were visible.

Some theories suggest it refers to the three main islands but it doesn't make any sense to call an island a star. If it was about the islands, we'd be singing 'Guard Pacific's triple isles” or similar.

Mr Bracken is long gone and apparently no-one thought, at the time of him writing, to ask exactly what he meant by the 'triple star”.

One wild theory suggests it relates to the flag of renegade Te Kooti, whom Bracken supposedly held in high regard, along with the Maori Sovereignty movement. If that is the case, then all these years the toff-nosed anthem has been harbouring treasonous intent against the Crown and the nation! However, on viewing historic images of Te Kooti's flag, it is clear there's five symbols and only one is a star, so that theory seems too far-fetched.

The mysterious three stars remain an enigma of national proportions.

Nation's van
And that's just the first verse. Not many people have sung beyond it, because only the first verses in Maori and English get aired, usually at the footy or other sport events... or late nights out when ‘Ten Guitars' seems to lose its appeal after the 15th rendition.

In the rarely-aired last verse, it urges 'guide her in the nation's van”.

I used to have a crusty old Toyota HiAce and a mate with a rattle-ridden, misty-windowed Ford Transit with a mattress in the back. At no stage were we ever trusted to guide any person of the female gender, in the van.

Nor did it occur to us to use the anthem, to explain to anxious parents of girlfriends, that it was sanctioned in official verse, to be returning their daughters home after midnight...

'It's okay, Mr Smith, we've been dutifully following the national anthem – guide her in the nation's van, in the bonds of love, and all that.”

Stars and flags
Which brings us around to the flag situation again. (Yawn).

If we have an anthem that encourages the nation to protect the triple star, then surely that is the image we should have on our flag.

Otherwise, the entire anthem is pointless. We should not be singing about guarding our three stars if we're not prepared to put them on a new flag.

So people, make up your minds. Either change the anthem to four stars, or the flag to three. Our national identity is at stake here.