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 But with Australia Day, it seems almost as if the debate (such as it is) is the only historical content there is: that if you took away the celebrity angst, there would be nothing left of the day at all, nothing to mark it out from any other summer holiday.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?
13 thoughts on “The absurdity that is Australia Day”
Irfan Yusuf
January 25, 2010 at 2:31 pmFab.
Phillip Musumeci
January 25, 2010 at 2:53 pmIt 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.
Michael Rogers
January 25, 2010 at 3:12 pmRichardson 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.
David
January 25, 2010 at 4:28 pmTalking 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 🙂
Skepticus Autartikus
January 26, 2010 at 6:33 pmThe 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…
Skepticus Autartikus
January 26, 2010 at 6:35 pmPhillip M
ALL of us who were born here are “indigenous”.
Charles Richardson
January 26, 2010 at 9:37 pmOK, I’ll bite: no, it’s manifestly not true that all of us who were born here are “indigenous”. I’m sure the blackbirds in my garden were born here, but nonetheless blackbirds are not an indigenous species; they were introduced from Europe post-colonisation. Of course you can argue about exactly how long your ancestors have to have been here (is the dingo indigenous?, for example), but the difference between the Aborigines (40,000 years or so) and people like me (less than 222 years) is so huge that it makes obvious sense to call one indigenous but not the other.
Jennifer Nash
January 27, 2010 at 2:33 pmI agree once upon a time Australia Day meant something. However, I just cannot bring myself to rejoice and celebrate the systematic erosion of our most fundamental human rights and the juristocracy, which allows this. The Constitutional Monarchy sucks big time and even denies us the right to a fair trial and the right to trial by jury!
Nor am I delighted about the judicial abuse and corruption against an unrepresented bullied schoolboy, who was bullied in court and was not heard on the fundamental points of law he unsuccessfully tried to raise in court, before he was told to shut up by Jean Dalton QC.
When he could no longer tolerate the harrowing courtroom abuse by Queensland Anti Discrimination Tribunal President, Jean Dalton QC and Robert Wensley QC and did not return to court for more intolerable abuse after spending two years in a harrowing legal system without a legal youth advocate, his complaint was dismissed and he was punished with a $ 28,000 plus costs order based on the draconian 1851 (eighteen fifty one) Infants Law Act.
Completely ignoring the fact the QADT is based on the legally binding 1976 ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) and the International Rights of the Child signed by Australia.
The costs order is little more than a red herring to divert attention from the fact that despite spending two years in this harrowing legal system, the actual complaint was never heard and was never remedied. Another Queensland human rights complaint (Hurst and Devlin v Education Queensland) took a staggering 5 (five) years to conclude. Government clearly puts a very low priority on youth advocacy for non delinquent children and the welfare and education of Queensland children.
By the way, Robert Wensley QC is the brother of Queensland Governor Penelope Wensley, who has maintained a persistent silence. Australian human rights advocates who advocate for the right of criminals, juvenile delinquents and illegal migrants have declined to advocate for my son and to publicise this ongoing travesty, which is very disappointing and unfair.
I am not too surprised that human rights lawyers with private practices are too afraid to speak up and I have contacted many of them, including the organisation Australian lawyers for human rights.
The major beneficiaries of human rights advocacy in Australia are criminals, juvenile delinquents and illegal migrants and queue jumpers and that is a very sad fact.
The following interview excerpts between Monica Attard and human rights lawyer, Julian Burnside QC speak for themselves: http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s2080576.htm Human rights advocate, Julian Burnside, QC
MONICA ATTARD: … I began by asking Julian Burnside about what he says is the very personal toll he’s paid for his public advocacy.
JULIAN BURNSIDE: Well I’ve lost quite a few friends because for the first few years at least a lot of people still accepted everything the Howard Government was saying and so I guess my views seemed a bit strange. And the second thing was that, you know, quite a, whereas I used to get most of my work from the big firms at the big end of town working for big corporations, a number of those firms, I think, found it politically unwise to keep briefing me and so for a few years at least, those people disappeared and briefed other people.
MONICA ATTARD: …why did they find it inappropriate to be briefing you?
JULIAN BURNSIDE: Ah, because the Federal Government hands out millions and millions of dollars worth of legal work to the private profession every year and the big national firms get the lion share of that work. Now, rightly or wrongly, the Government is perceived as being somewhat vindictive so that if you are wanting more work from the Government it’s not a smart move to be seen to be briefing one of the Government’s critics…
Links to the unreported story of the human rights abuses, judicial abuse and gross judicial misconduct, denial of attention, electoral representation and advocacy for my Australian born son:
QLD Governor Silent on Judicial Corruption Claims Against Brother http://bit.ly/IBi4k
Armed Police Eject Mother From Queensland Parliament http://bit.ly/2WpSxG
Attorney General Dick Stonewalls On Boy’s Judicial Abuse Complaint http://bit.ly/NMuqK
Governor of Queensland’s charade and judicial corruption denial continues http://bit.ly/2jcBAY
Michael Rogers
January 27, 2010 at 4:24 pmA quick ‘Google’ finds Jennifer Nash appearing in comments pages all over the place detailing the above, no matter what the topic.
She certainly sounds aggrieved but statements like, “The major beneficiaries of human rights advocacy in Australia are criminals, juvenile delinquents and illegal migrants and queue jumpers and that is a very sad fact.” do her cause no good.
(Or maybe they do – see below.)
Terms such as “illegal migrants” and “queue jumpers” and the suggestion that certain categories of people don’t deserve the benefit of “human rights advocacy”, are revealing.
The site one ends up at following the links in Nash’s post contains the following;
“Mathaba has called for new arrivals to be placed in distant remote unoccupied areas with the permission of the original owners of the land, and to build up new self-sufficient communities in the same way as earlier waves of immigration did in the past, rather than allow them to degrade and destroy existing infrastructures.”
and “Mathaba will be accepting anti-immigration advertising in response, and will match any donations toward such advertising on an equal basis, matching dollar for dollar.”
I smell a ‘Pauline Hanson’ on the make.
Time for an astute journalist somewhere to get in on the ground floor?
gianni
January 27, 2010 at 8:00 pmThe landing at Sydney Cove wasn’t an act by Australians and it shouldn’t commemorated as our national day of celebration. It was the British establishing a penal colony.
What we celebrate would the equivalent of the USA commemorating the landing of the Pilgrims as their national day, instead of July 4. Both dates are significant, but only one represents an act of self-determination, whose purpose was to found a new nation.
If it can’t be January 1, because we want to keep it for New Year’s day, why not September 17, when after years of effort and multiple referenda, on 17-Sep-1900 Queen Victoria recognised our (modulo the Aboriginal peoples) act of self-determination and proclaimed the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act and declared it operative from 1 January 1901 ?