And so Australia Day rolls around again, with the usual somewhat half-hearted public controversy over its meaning and significance. Last night, Thomas Keneally told a commemorative “Australian of the Year” event that he was now reconciled to celebrating the day, believing “it has come to stand for a duality of experiences, genesis and loss”.
Clearly not everyone feels the same way: many will mark tomorrow as “invasion day” or “survival day”, and many more will be blissfully unaware of any historical significance at all.
There’s nothing wrong with historical debate, and no reason why everyone should share the same interpretation of their country’s history. But with Australia Day, it seems almost as if the debate (such as it is) is the only historical content there is: that if you took away the celebrity angst, there would be nothing left of the day at all, nothing to mark it out from any other summer holiday.
Contrast, for example, with Anzac Day, which is also the site of historical controversy, but where the controversy takes place against a background commemoration of a real event of real importance. People disagree about its interpretation, but they agree that it means something, and even those who avoid the debate altogether and just enjoy the holiday still mostly understand how it originated.
So here’s a modest suggestion for alleviating some of the Australia Day uneasiness and bringing it more into line with popular expectations: let’s go back to celebrating it by a long weekend, and give up the experiment of a fixed holiday that always falls on January 26.
The fixed-day holiday was a piece of right-wing political correctness from the 1980s and ’90s to boost patriotic sentiment. It was also supported by the business lobby, attracted by the idea of not having to give workers a holiday when the 26th fell on a weekend (a dubious benefit even in its own terms, since it also promotes absenteeism when, like this year, the 26th falls mid-week and workers take off extra days for continuity).
But historical significance can’t be manufactured out of whole cloth. The respect we give Anzac Day isn’t just an artifact of the calendar, any more than the July 4 in the United States or July 14 in France. The fixed holiday can’t disguise the fact that the landing in Sydney Cove is not felt as an occasion of national significance. It would make sense as a local Sydney holiday; as a national day it is purely arbitrary.
Few will want to give up a holiday, and the chance of winning popular support to rename the day or move it to some other time of year seems minimal. We’re stuck with Australia Day. But there’s no reason we have to be stuck with the fixed date that disrupts our planning and often deprives us of a holiday. That represents a recent change, and it could be changed back.
In the old days, Australia Day meant something: the end of the summer holiday period, celebrated with a long weekend so that even those who had been back at work for a couple of weeks could enjoy a bit more holiday spirit, innocent of historical controversy. Would it really be contrary to our national character to try to return it to that?
Fab.
It seems strange that people celebrate January 26. Sure, that is an important date – maybe more so if you are British or if you are indigenous, but for quite different reasons. However, our predecessors were able to propose and discuss and negotiate the creation of “One continent for a nation, one nation for a continent” and that peaceful process which involved all sorts of citizens over a period of more than a decade is surely more significant that the boat arrival date for some imperial power play. Federation day, January 1, seems more like Australia’s day to me.
Richardson writes that Anzac Day commemorates “a real event of real importance”.
Maybe to the Turks who repelled an invasion the aim of which was to support Czarist Russia. The ‘event’ besides being a failure was a minor sideshow which today is of little or no note for instance in France which had more casualties than the ANZAC troops.
In this, it is just as manufactured as ‘Australia Day’ which marks the founding of what today would be an illegal penal colony in the approximate half of the continent claimed at the time by the British Empire.
However, the fact that the 1788 colony was in effect a police state, perhaps today there is some credence to Tony Abbott’s claim that it represented “the beginnings of modern Australia”.
It is of note though that both of Australia’s so called national days, Australia and Anzac day both involve invasions.
Talking of Tony Abbott, he takes the prize for the mosy idiotic statement of the day. Said the refugee from the seminary…”Ihope people haven’t taken a sicky today, to get a 4 day break.” No of course thousands haven’t done that your reverence. The empty building sites, offices, govet depts all doing the right thing and taking a days leave!!!! You twerp. Still in your world I guess everything happens ‘as it is written’. What!!!!! oh you want to be Prime Minister of Australia 🙂
The only people who see today as an opportunity for a “debate” are the motley gradually dying out crew of bitter white bourgeois baby boomer lefties who still can’t accept no-one is interested in their tedious “culture wars”. Thomas Kennealy has admitted defeat why can’t the rest of you bums?
I suppose it doesn’t matter. While the rest of us spend the day celebrating with our circle of multiethnic intermarried friends and families, you shrivelled up Anglo relics of a dying age (the 1970s) can just spend another day at home in your darkened bedrooms tapping away…