Seems Australia’s culture warriors might have missed their chance. As the media reporting has it, Australians have already moved Australia Day on from its 30-year-long moment of celebration of European settlement into a deeper recognition of the country.
The moment the date marks — the hoisting of the British flag on Gadigal land to assert the beginnings of colonisation in 1788 — went all but unremarked in the pre-date debate about what the day meant, or could mean. More, much of that discussion came from Aboriginal voices who’ve led the resistance to the co-option of the date in the service of an exclusionary settler nationalism.
Perhaps it’s laid a template for the media, too, to move on from a narrow “change the date” controversy into deeper reflection. Take Wesley Enoch’s commentary in the Nine mastheads for the day “to stand as a spur to discuss our history and remember the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia.” Or Megan Davis quoted in The Australian: “We don’t need to change the date, but the Uluru Statement can change the nation.” As IndigenousX’s Luke Pearson has been saying over the past few Australia Days: don’t change the date, change the nation.
Maybe, just maybe, we can hope that the nuance of the past few days has washed the panic over “wokeness” that continues to roil US politics out from Australian discussion. Perhaps the door to embracing the opportunity of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is more open than it’s looked.
There’s been some eye-rubbing moments. Was it really just a year ago that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was lashing out at Cricket Australia for its reluctance to wrap its Big Bash matches in the ritual of the date and dismissing Invasion Day protests with ham-fisted what-aboutery?
“When those 12 [sic] ships turned up in Sydney all those years ago, it wasn’t a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either,” he lectured in his own rendering of the Howard era’s “black armband” bombast.
This year, his official statement was all thoughtful consideration about the Australian story: “A story,” he wrote in the Nine mastheads, “of strength and resilience that spans 65,000 years, of a continent that we love and contend with, and of a free and fair people who live in relative harmony.”
Where previous years brought federal government bans on council’s shifting citizenship ceremonies from January 26, this year brought a more inclusionary political symbolism: the buy-out of copyright in the Aboriginal flag and the proposal of the Ngurra Cultural Precinct within Canberra’s parliamentary triangle as “a place of reflection and recognition for Indigenous Australians, the oldest living culture in the world”.
Even the News Corp media had more important things to do than defending the continued celebration of the colonial project, like civility policing outgoing Australian of the Year Grace Tame’s “not willing to make nice” moment. (“What a graceless sourpuss,” sniffed Miranda Devine in the company’s tabloids. Meanwhile on social media, Amy Remeikis’ takedown of The Australian‘s Peter van Onselen on The Project went viral.)
The only real clanger came in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph editorial where, apparently, “the arrival in Australia of the First Fleet in 1788 was the initial step towards multiculturalism.”
By the morning after, as the date receded into the media’s rear-view mirror, all the protests and reflections — both official and Indigenous — were more or less neutrally integrated into the “what just happened” reporting of the day. Even the red-paint rendering of Melbourne’s Cook statue was hurried over as “vandalism” rather than seized as an opportunity for hand-wringing moral panic.
In the lead-up to the day, polling gave some insight into what’s going on. The Conversation reported that while 60% may want to keep the date, that support slides quickly as those asked get younger.
It may be that Morrison is attempting to pivot back to his Team Australia moment of the early pandemic. Maybe he thinks this next election will be determined more by suburban women voters tempted by the “Voices of” independents than by the “men at risk of voting Labor” identified by Guardian Australia’s Katherine Murphy last year.
The use of Australia Day to imagine the Australian community out of settler nationalism is recent. Much of the country has always felt uncomfortable with its politicisation. It already felt like an anachronism when launched as part of the 1988 bicentennial celebrations.
Now, maybe, the consistent resistance to that narrow nationalism is finally winning out.
I hope so.
When i used to run a food van, I only ever did an Australia day gig once…it was bloody disgusting. Aggro people wearing aussie flag capes, clearly feeling this was their day to fully vent their “inner-racist” without having to look over their shoulders first. If you’ve ever seen that American horror movie, “The Purge”, it had that kind of vibe about it.
Anyway, after that time, never again. I just started to batten down the hatches on the 26th, and want it to be over.
Hopefully the tide is turning.
A National Day cannot be . . . a divisive day. But that is what our “National Day” has become. Consequently as a Nation. We are divided. The honesty of Glenn’s comment ie “I just started to batten down the hatches . . .”
I am of Convict heritage. With all that implies when accused of Invasion and resultant outcomes. In my head . . . hang-on. Why am I and mine indicted? Family heritage saw female family members beaten to death by Indigenous fighting for their homelands. Do I blame? No! But nor do I and mine wish to be blamed.
Like you Graybul, I’m descended from Convicts, and also so-called, “Free Settlers”.
The former, I’m certain didn’t want to be here. In fact, one fellow left for England as soon as his sentence expired, but was promptly arrested and returned to Sydney and gaoled – until the Governor realised the Clerk had incorrectly spelled his name.
He remained here, married and had thirteen children – one of whom “married” an indigenous woman.
Whilst I despise the way Indigenous peoples have been treated by so many since Cook’s arrival, I nonetheless refuse to accept any culpability/liability in my own name, until (and I hope I never do) I discover that someone, anyone related to me, has mistreated a First Nations person, intentionally or otherwise.
I confess that I enjoyed the Bicentennial events, but I don’t see the need for celebrating every year.
But, like everything in life, it’s purely a matter of opinion and I realise thousands, indeed millions of Aussies would beg to differ.
This isn’t about who massacred who. It is about truth-telling. Your family’s story is a part of that truth telling. After truth telling there will be accounting and then a treaty. After the treaty we’ll be mature enough to march ahead united in dumping the British and becoming a republic.
I’m from farming stock, migrated here in the 1830s and “granted” land in the Hunter. We didn’t ask who the land belonged to before us, or that receiving stolen goods is a crime.
Zeke. It appears that you have already determined how Australia be re-designed to accept, resolve nation’s future? All the way through to “dumping” (I assume ‘relationship’ with UK) and then fully compliant . . . becoming a Republic?
Damn, delusion! I thought we Australian’s were democratic.
the insidious thing about colonisation is that it is a slow grinding offensive that takes place over generations, and the weapon it employs – physical presence on another’s land – requires boots on the ground, land occupied and enough might to stay there.
Whether convicts or free settlers are the weapons employed by the colonisers is neither here nor there to them – all those souls are just the means to the end, which is the gradual dispossession of the original inhabitants. So the real architects of the colonisation of Oz were the rulers of Britain at the time, and not the convicts they sent.
However, once colonisation takes hold, the potential futures for the powerless convicts and the dispossessed indigenous head off down vastly different paths. The convicts can become free, and prosper, but the indigenous can not. Thing can only track down for them, as each newly freed and aspirational convict and settler does the job of the colonisers that sent them – as the colonisers knew would happen, because that’s how it’s supposed to work.
and so here we are now in 2022, generation upon generation of non-indigenous building upon that fundamental advantage colonisation gives, at the on-going expense of the original inhabitants.
So long as that historical injustice never gets addressed, it’s got to stick in the craw of those who were dispossessed forever – as well as in the communal guilt many non-indigenous must feel – so it would definitely be a good thing to fix, regardless of where our origins lie, imo.
You (and I) are benefitting from the historical genocide and dispossession – akin to receiving stolen property. And we’re part of a dominant white majority not doing enough to redress the continuing social and economic injustices, not least of which is denying the truth about how we got here. For example, the Australian war memorial still maintains the convenient fiction that there has never been a war on Australian soil.
I also am descended from free settlers and early mariners in what was initially the colony of Queensland..
My father worked bush a lot of his life and was recognised as a Wik man, although we do not have any aboriginal blood.
My father considered it to be an honour.
I think we should change the date because I can see no relevance to the settlement of Port Jackson as far as the nation of Australia is concerned.
It’s still inappropriate to celebrate 26 January as Australia’s national day. Not only is it an insult rubbing salt into the wounds of dispossession and genocide for indigenous Australians, it is also an insult to anyone living outside NSW. It marks the commencement of a British penal colony called ‘New South Wales’ at a place the British renamed ‘Sydney Cove’. So by all means call it ‘Sydney Day’ or ‘NSW Day’, but not ‘Australia Day’. Sydney is not Australia, even though Sydney-siders may have trouble understanding that.
Absolutely, and “Australia” was born January 01 1901 – ‘sadly’ a day already taken as a public holiday…. “Walk and chew gum?”
Yep, and even after 1901 our ‘sovereignty’ applied only to domestic affairs. Foreign affairs remained in the hands of the British, as did the highest court of appeal.
While Morrison’s PMO has been doing it’s best to continue that tradition of “looking after” the domestic affairs of this government.
Perhaps the significance of forming the AU federation (1/1/1901) is just going to take more time. It was only in late 2013 that the recent boat people had spent as much time in British colonies 1788-1900 as they had in an independent (more-or-less) nation 1901-2013.
I’m hoping it isn’t a gum problem and we can get over ‘Sydney Day’ which seems focussed on that 1788 event to the detriment of Federation Day which we ourselves brought about after many years of collaborative work.
Van Onselen? ….. A card carrying member of the “Porter’s Mates Club”…….
Yep, very much a part of the problem.
The national day of most nations marks the day they gained independence from empires or other oppressors
Australia is probably alone in celebrating the day the empire took over.
I don’t know which date we should move the day to, but it has to move.
In the eyes of the world, we became the Commonwealth of Australia. officially, on 1st January, 1901. Why is it so hard to accept that date…even if it is New Year’s Day? NYD has NOTHING to do with the history of Australia…and anyway, why can’t we ‘walk and chew gum at the same time’? As another commentator has mentioned above.
And the first act of the parliament was the White Australia Policy aka Immigration Restriction Act yes?
Arguably it’s not even new year in the southern hemisphere anyway. New year on January 1 approximates to the winter solstice in the north – the day the sun begins to come back. Southern hemisphere new year is 21 June.
Have to admit I had much the same thoughts yesterday, Charles … and today.
I’d agree with that.
The day really should be inclusive of ALL Australians.
Another option could be the date the Indigenous People, got a say in the governance of the country with voting rights.
Or put the whole thing off until Australia becomes a republic.
I watched the Sydney TV largely because William Barton, Emma Donovan and Shane Howard were opening the music, I wept. I was presently surprised by the overall result. But I spare a thought for a top end Aboriginal singer that I know who told me Australia Day in Darwin is head for the long grass time, largely for the reasons that Glenn Lumsden outlines. She said “No Blackfella feels safe mate”. I am a mix of Irish convict, settler, Yankee Republican Lincoln voting gold rush digger and one or two other odds and sods. I despise those who think loving Australia means waving a flag that is half from another country, (or in the PM’s case coughing and spitting in it). If that is what it means to love Australia then you don’t. I loathe what Howard began and Morrison continues with their endless identity politics. I love Australia and I am proud of some of what we have done, but ashamed that we continue to lie and obscure the dark side (Alan Tudge and your cronies)