Yet again Australia Day has come upon us and yet again we re-open the discussion about the existence of Australia Day. Probably with the exception of Columbus Day in the United States, I don't think that many public holidays around the world have such a contested set of cultural narratives which exist about it.
Australia Day is itself symptomatic of an abject refusal by the country to confront its own past; and this is perpetrated by both the authoritarian right which also contains an overtly racist element and the economic right who do not want to have to pay for anything in the country and especially not making good on consequences of the past. Racists do not want to acknowledge the past and business does not want to pay for something that it sees no value in.
Therein lies the problem. Australia has never bothered to face its own past because at almost every point in the nation's history, it would have to face the ugly reality that ever since the time that the land was injured by spearing it with force, it has almost always been controlled by moral bankruptcy.
In principle you do not need to have a reason to have a public holiday. For instance, Great Britain has four Bank Holidays which originally started out as the day when everyone else but the banks would go on holiday; leaving the banks a whole day to settle and reconcile their accounts. A Bank Holiday in Great Britain commemorates nothing. Even within the normal operation of the week, Jewish people have a different notion of which day is holy, to Muslims, Sihks, and Christians, and there is even variations among different groups of Christians.
Therefore, if the date in question is not intrinsically meaningful and the day in question is not intrinsically meaningful, then the meaning which arises is purely that meaning which is credited to it through the cultural story which is then overlaid on top of it. This is a case of yet again the world is made up of stories.
That should tell us that the reason for Australia Day is not about the date of the 26th of January but about the story of why that day has been selected. On that note, we immediately run into a deliberate refusal to acknowledge that the past exists.
The day itself is not a day of foundation of the nation but rather, the day in which by proclamation, sovereignty of the land was simply stolen by force. This was a military action by the Royal Navy and up until there was the beginning of responsible government, we had direct rule by the military.
The people who want to write some kind of narrative saying that the day is a day when everyone can come together, need to explicitly deny both the history and the reality of what the day actually stands for.
I am not a republican because it has been consistently proven in my lifetime that we are as a nation a bunch of cruel cruel eejits and so I do not think that we are capable of inventing a non-partisan and non-political form of republic but if we were going to become a republic one day, then that is day that would replace Australia Day.
The actual history and the reasoning for wanting to start a colony in New South Wales is pretty easy to understand. Having just lost the Thirteen Colonies of America in the American Revolution and needing to address overcrowding in the British prison system, the First Fleet was sent out as virutally free labour, with prisoners having their death sentences commuted to transportation.
The crankiest Yorkshireman of all, Captain James Cook, claimed sovereignty over all of the land Australia from the shore of Possession Island in 1770; so the events which followed from Joseph Banks' "Proposal for Establishing a Settlement in New South Wales" (24th Aug 1783); which was made almost immediately after the end of fighting in America, seem like a natural consequence.
The arrival in 1788 of the First Fleet of eleven Royal Navy ships, and where the proclamation of the colony of New South Wales is purely a military operation. Lt Gen. Watkin Tench's "Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson" (1792) is further proof that this was nothing more than a military operation; where he basically ridicules any notion that the people who were already here were worth incorporating into the colony. He places the value of the first peoples of Australia as even less than Benjamin Franklin's "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America" (1770) and that viewpoint is demonstrably the same sin which has been repeated for 232 years.
What we are left with then, is a date which is celebrated because of imperial triumphalism, some of tacit racism (because racists need to find some covert platform for their story), or a kind of economically driven agenda.
What followed was genocide, denial, dispossession, whitewash, forgetting, and now further denial. There is also a refusal to accept any responsibility for the past, because that admits liability.
I heard commentary on the radio this morning which said that anyone who wanted to change the date, was playing identity politics. It takes a special type of hypocrisy to accuse someone else of playing identity politics while simultaneously actually playing identity politics yourself and over a subject which itself is exclusively about the identity of the nation.
This is who we are as a nation? Happy Australia Day.
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