Horse 3432 - NSW Proclamation Day

Happy Not Australia Day.

If you think that this is Australia Day, you are a sad strange little person.

26th January is not the date that Australia became a nation. Nope. That date was 1st January 1901; when after a series of Constitutional Conventions, a series of Referenda, the colonies of Fiji and New Zealand both choosing to withdraw from the process of Federation, the legislation that created the new Crown as a separate legal person called the Commonwealth Of Australia cam into effect after being passed by the British Parliament in 1900.

26th January is not the date that Australia was first settled by the British. Nope. That date was 7th February 1788; when after leaving merry old England in May 1787, the eleven ships which comprised the First Fleet, vomited out their cargo of convicts, criminals, ne'er-do-wells, and chancer sailors who wanted titles, upon the lands at Gadigal and the Eora people. The 11 Ships had originally planned to dump their prisoners at Botany Bay on 20th January 1788 but in a remarkable act of British optimism, Captain Arthur Phillip saw that the bay was far to shallow to be sensible and sent scouts up the cost wherein they found the very deep river/port of Port Jackson.

26th January is actually the day that Captain Arthur Phillip decided to stick his flag in the dirt and claim it in the name of King George! Hurrah! On 7th February 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip decided to make his claim permanent, retroactively from the date that he stuck a flag in the dirt; so 26th of January is actually New South Wales Proclamation Day.

And in fact, Proclamation Day is the name of the day that is used right through official documents in the early days of the colony; including when Governor Bligh in an heroic act of hiding under the bed when the New South Wales Corps decided to arrest him and then throw the colony under direct military rule in 1808. Proclamation Day is the name of the day that was used during the half-hearted Golden Jubilee of the colony and in the celebration of the Centenary in 1888.

The name 'Australia Day' doesn't really appear until during the First World War, when various charitable appeals were made to fund things like medical supplies and other comfort goods, to make the lives of volunteers who had left to go and fight in a mess in which they found the horrors of mechanised and chemical conflict first hand. Australia Day was on different dates and was on 30th July 1915, 28th July 1916, 27th July 1917, and 26th July 1918. 

The 26th of January sort of fell into relative obscurity until 1938 when suddenly a wave of patriotism fell over the nation as the gathering storm clouds of war loomed over Europe for a second time. The 150th Anniversary of British Settlement was flogged for all it was worth, likely to garner support for PM Lyons' expected eventual unconditional decree to send more Australian bodies into the meat grinder of a European conflict. Lyons helpfully died in office, which meant that the UAP was thrown into confusion and Earle Page became PM for a bit; then Menzies took exactly the same actions that Lyons would have done.

The 26th of January 1938 was also declared as an unofficial Aboriginal Day Of Mourning, because the injustices of having land taken without consent, being killed for a bounty of ninepence per head, having no legal rights at all in some states until Federation, and then having even basic rights surrounding citizenship denied, had never been addressed. To this day, we still have no treaty, and no formal process for trying to reconcile the tensions and the knavery of refusing to deal with unceded sovereignty. The next presumed Prime Minister is openly unrepentant and unapologetic for these injustices.

It wasn't until 1988 that full-on flag-waving patriotism was foisted upon Australia for the Bicentenary and it wasn't until 1994 that the date actually became a national holiday. It had been a holiday previously in different states.

The thing that the flag-waving hooray henrys haven't been able to tell us ever, is why anyone outside of New South Wales has an interest in Proclamation Day; especially New South Wales Proclamation Day. What makes these people think that anyone living in Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, or Western Australia, would want to celebrate the official founding of New South Wales? 

The number plates in the different states used to have slogans like "South Australia - The Festival State", "Queensland - The Sunshine State", "Victoria - The Garden State", but in here we had "New South Wales - The Premier State". It used to be that every time our yellow and black number plates travelled to these often hostile and unfriendly backwaters, they'd proclaim the New South Wales is The Premier State, the Best State; and they knew it. It is no coincidence that it was only after state slogans appeared on number plates that the other states decided that they had to cower in the glory of New South Wales and try to claim our Proclamation Day as Australia Day.

Moreover, why should the decent and good and fair people of New South Wales want to share this holiday with them? They're all a bunch of splitters. As far as the fair people of New South Wales are concerned, we are the best. The rottenest bit of this island of ours, is held in the hands of five unfriendly powers.

"It would therefore seem obvious that patriotism as a feeling, is a bad and harmful feeling, and as a doctrine is a stupid doctrine. For it is clear that if each people and each State considers itself the best of peoples and States, they all dwell in a gross and harmful delusion."

- Patriotism And Government, Leo Tolstoy (1900)

It used to be that the only time that anyone in this country cared about patriotism, it was to wrap ourselves in green and gold because of sport. We should rightly view any overt display of patriotism as unAustralian because it is deeply suspicious and suspect. Just who do those people think they are anyway? Do they want to be Seppos? Imported patriotism from Seppoland is also deeply suspicious and suspect.

Yeah, nah bro. Australia Day is unAustralian. Especially because it is actually NSW Proclamation Day.