25 January 2022
Tomorrow, 26 January, is Australia Day; Australia’s national day, the day the nation is supposed to celebrate our nation, its people, culture, and achievement. For those not acquainted with Australian history, it marks the date on which the first European (British) settlement was founded on the Australian continent; that settlement was penal colony.
Our national day should be a day when the nation comes together. If it ever did, it no longer does. Each year, for some, 26 January becomes a source of division, dispute, and disharmony, which has been co-opted by a range of groups with their own agendas. For many others, it is simply a public holiday, on which a few Australia-related events occur.
Why is it so? The answer will vary depending on the person to whom you ask, which probably explains the emerging division within the community.
Foremost amongst Australians who object to 26 January being Australia’s national day are our First People, the Australians once known as Aborigines. There is little historical or archaeological doubt that our First People have occupied the land, now known as Australia, for tens of thousands of years, maybe longer. They developed their own culture and civilisation and lived in harmony with the land and sea around them.
Europeans did not recognise, acknowledge, or seek to understand, that culture and civilisation. Instead, they assessed our First People as savages, asserted that there was no civilisation or culture in existence, and declared the land terra nullius, which meant that under British law, they could behave as if no humans existed on the land. In the period since 1788, our First People were dispossessed of their land, routinely murdered, banned from practising their culture and ceremonies, banned from using their own language, endured having their children removed from them, and then experienced the basest racism, and an ever-growing marginalisation in a country that plainly wanted them out of sight and mind.
It’s hardly surprising that Australia’s First People do not embrace the notion that the anniversary of the first British settlement should be one to celebrate; many refer to 26 January as ‘Invasion Day’. I agree that 26 January is the wrong day to be celebrating all things Australian, but for different reasons.
A Google search, and a visit to Wikipedia, presented a helpful list of the various national days around the globe, and the events they commemorate. Common themes emerged: declarations of independence, or actual independence, from another country, the formation of republics, anniversary of the first government, victory in battle that led to the formation or independence of the country. In short, each country’s national day commemorates an event or moment when the people of that country declare ‘we are special and unique, we wish to be recognised as special, unique and separate from other nations, and to run our own affairs, independently of the will of anyone else’.
This stands in contrast to 26 January, which commemorates nothing more than the first British settlement; not just any settlement, a penal colony, a place to which Britain could export its criminals, to be used as slave labour for the Empire. Not only that, but the settlement was in one (at that stage) tiny spot on our continent, the place now known as Sydney. Despite what many Sydneysiders might say, Australia is so much more than Sydney, or even the State of New South Wales.
It is true that, from that penal colony, wider and more expansive settlements in other parts of Australia followed, and that, had it not been for that first settlement, the Australia that exists today may not have happened. However, throughout all that expansion and settlement, the people still regarded themselves as bound to and by the British monarch. They were not Australian, they were British subjects, and Britain was the final arbiter on all things to do with government and law.
It took over 100 years after that first British settlement before people living in Australia finally resolved to approve a national constitution and system of government that would be an ‘Australian’ government, and to unite the (then) separate States into a single country. Up until then, ‘Australia’ was merely a place on a map; it was only on and from 1 January 1901 that ‘Australia’ started to become a nation.
Many other countries started as (mainly European) colonies, but it is significant that none of them have as their national day the date on which the colonists ‘discovered’ the country (probably because it was, in fact, already there), or founded their first settlement. That’s because colonisation and settlement followed an all-to-predictable path: invasion, and dispossession and a general ‘screwing-over’ of the indigenous population. It may well be that their populations (particularly those who descended from the original colonists) prefer to honour their more-recent independence than own the history that led them to that point. Australians, however, seem to have a kind of historical blind spot; they celebrate a day that has nothing to do with Australia, the nation, but also (at least until recently) airbrush away the awfulness that led up to us becoming a nation.
It would be tempting to attribute the ambivalence of many Australians to Australia Day to a gradual removal of that blind spot. Certainly, a growing number of Australians are losing that blind spot, despite the efforts of the cultural warriors on the conservative side. However, I am convinced that many Australians – particularly those who do not have British backgrounds – simply have difficulty understanding how the founding of a penal colony says anything about their country, as the independent and special nation in which they live.
So, what date should be our national day? The initial candidate would be 1 January, the anniversary of the formal beginning of our Commonwealth of Australia. Unfortunately, problems abound with this choice: (a) it’s already a public holiday (and no government with any brain would take away a public holiday from an Australian without giving them a new one); (b) strictly, as Western Australia did not join the Federation until slightly later, our WA friends may be inclined to take issue with this choice; and (c) as the new and subsequent Commonwealth governments largely continued and affirmed the treatment of First Peoples imposed by colonial governments, I expect that 1 January will not be embraced by our First Peoples either.
Given that the respective States had the votes to join the Commonwealth on different dates, we can’t use the date of a vote to become a Federation either. Frankly, one could nominate a range of other dates, but I doubt that any of them will garner national support for the simple reason that none signify our nationhood.
However, I would, humbly, submit there is a date that we should use, but it’s date for an event that has not yet happened. That date is the date on which the Australian government, on behalf of the people of Australia, conclude a treaty with our First Peoples. On that date, Australia will show itself to be a true nation, one mature enough to be prepared to acknowledge and accept its past, and willing work towards a future that brings justice to all its citizens. That’s a day on which I will be proud to wave an Australian flag, do all things Australian and celebrate the country that I love.
