Reflections on Australia Day, Australian culture, and Aboriginal rights

Alternate Title: What the hell were we smoking when we thought of January 26th?

Expect a long one, kids.

Australia Day was two days ago, and I was going to write a post for it. But then life crept up on me, I ended up not writing said post, and now I feel a little bit differently about it anyway.

Let me start from the beginning.

My original feelings were that I couldn’t celebrate Australia Day, for a few reasons. I still feel the same way about these reasons, but I’m not so sure that my anti-celebration stance still holds. I’ll get to that though. First of all, I’ll go through the reasons.

Most of Australia sees the 26th of January as the date for the celebration of the establishment of a society we love and wouldn’t trade for the world. I believe in celebrating that. I just think that the 26th is the wrong day to choose for said celebration.

So the first of January? I’ll go with that. Australia became, well, Australia, its own country, on 1 January 1901. Federation Day marked the beginning of a new year and a new nation with its own purpose and a vision and all that jazz. I mean, it was still quite similar to Britain in a lot of those respects, but fundamentally, it was the day of formal acknowledgement that we were beginning to move away from Britain and have our own set of national identities. It’s a celebration of a positive event of building up. No matter that some people thought that others were completely messed up for proposing Federation–the date as a whole still marks something constructive: a birth.

But the 26th of January is the anniversary of no such thing. I can’t say it’s an anniversary of death with a straight face, but it’s pretty close.

Years ago, Captain James Cook claimed this land as a commodity on behalf of Britain, denying the pre-existing Aboriginal right to the land they were already on. We didn’t even acknowledge their humanity, instead classifying them under the National Flora and Fauna Act until something crazy like 1956.

Basically, white people just swanned in, said, “That looks good. Let’s use it to house the dregs of our society”, swanned out, and swanned right back in with a bunch of the dregs of their society. On the 26th of January, 1788, the first batch of dregs landed. It’s the day Australia began to work as a useful commodity for Britain, not a country.

It kind of all began to go downhill from there. It marked the beginning of the British hunting Aboriginal people for sport, treating them like dirt, and banning them from ‘civilised’ areas. America wasn’t the only country with Jim Crow laws: we had a whole stack of them.

To sum up, the whole connection with 26th January is way more fraught with tension than January 1st. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that Federation is the opposite of the 26th, and that it was the day Aboriginal people were given rights and everybody was happy and had their own pet fluffy duckling. If we’re going to look at it objectively, January 26th is the anniversary of the start of exploitation and mass-scale colonisation of an invaded land, and January 1st is the anniversary of the creation of a new nation founded on said exploitation and colonisation 110 years later.

While there are a multitude of things wrong with this, I can’t help but see the second date as being comparatively so much more positive (we’re leaving objective territory now. Feel free to disagree with me).

The main reason I feel this way is that the society we’ve got right now is much better than the society we were a hundred and twelve years ago. We’ve got a long way to go, but the fact remains that we have come pretty damn far. We wouldn’t be where we are today without Australia becoming its own country, and I think it’s right to celebrate the major milestone of the development of our own cultual identity. We can’t say just when the very beginning was, but we can point to the first of January 1901 and say, “This is when it was set in stone.”

And if you’re looking to celebrate the day your nation was born, it might be a good idea to actually celebrate it closer to the day it was born. I know it’s all stuffed up because 1 Jan is New Year’s Day too, but, I mean, just give us an extra day after it. It’s like those years when Christmas falls on a Saturday, so we get Boxing Day on Sunday, and Boxing Day Holiday on Monday. Just have Federation Day Holiday on January 2nd or something. If the reason we got January 26th was because it was the closest day that wasn’t a holiday to Federation–I have to say, I think it was still kind of a dumb choice.

***

Making a rather important tangent before we can go any further, can we say that the beginning of the development of our cultural identity was, in fact, the date the First Fleet landed? Am I constructing an argument against the 26th of January out of nothing?

This is where it all gets rather grey.

Yes, you can make a case for that. You definitely can. You can say that the landing of the First Fleet meant that our population count suddenly leapt into existence (though you’d be forgetting Aboriginal people, and according to everyone they were around before the 1700s). You can say that the instant the convicts landed on Australian (well, British, at that time) soil, they had to adapt to a new way of life in a new country. They had to make a go of it. They had to pull their heads in, get rough-and-ready, and just deal with it–all typically Australian values. Well, okay, maybe not the pulling your head in part.

The first groups and classes who made their way onto Australian soil, too, helped to define the new attitudes of this country. Of course the middle class and the upper class came over later on, when business (i.e. gold and sheep) was booming, but the very first major influx of attitudes were the lower class in England with a smattering of Irish political prisoners. They were used to hard knocks, to being treated unfairly. They were fairly anti-establisment, and small wonder: you could get transported to Australia for stealing half a loaf of bread. They used to hang kids for stealing hankies. Not really the hardened criminal past we like to pretend we have, is it?

Fact remains, though, you can tell that although the majority of Australians can’t complain about oppression, we still carry the stamp of that in our cultural attitudes. The little Aussie battler is practically trademarked, even though the most we normally battle against these days is rising taxes and the most daring thing we do is drink and drive, or, if we’re going to get really wild, egg Julia Gillard. These attitudes, and more, have been passed down through society from a time when bushrangers were romantic figures, and it was settlers vs squatters (the squatters won. It’s Australia).

I balance that against the way Britain controlled everything. The way the national identity was only just in the very vague stages of being formed. The fact that Australia wasn’t by itself, but a collection of divided colonies overseen and completely controlled by Britain.

On 26th January 1788, the defining presence was that of exploitation and invasion rather than the vague beginnings of a national identity. When they got off that boat, those people were cowed and sore and sick and injured and slow and bruised and traumatised. The jailers and the officers, all British to the core, ruled the roost. At that stage, the convicts and prisoners were merely bringing over their own class identity to cope with the situation they’d been forced into. They adjusted it here and there, I’m sure, but the main thing is that these people had no concept of being a nation unto themselves. They were British, through and through. (Except for the Irish prisoners.) As for the Aboriginal people, they were a culture separate of their own–and they do play a role in our culture and national identity now.

Summary: the beginnings of the hallmarks of our national identity as we know it were definitely there, but the concept of themselves as a separate nation definitelywasn’t. For me, that’s the dealbreaker, since to have a national identity, you kind of need a nation to go with it. But you might say it differently.

This really is a matter of opinion. I can’t stand here and say that it’s definitively wrong to use January 26th as Australia Day (though looking back, I seem to have done my best). I’m weighing everything up and making my own judgements, and it’s a bit like weighing up chalky cheese and cheesy chalk. They’re not completely different, they do relate to each other–but they’re not that similar either.

De-tangent-ing now.

***

To get back to talking about society being better than before and therefore we should celebrate it: we also need to examine ‘better’ from the point of view of Aboriginal people.

Obviously, Aboriginal people still face marginalisation and discrimination from like everyone else in the country. In turn, there are a number of Aboriginal groups who harbour a lot of bitterness and resentment, and for good reason. We’re still a fairly divided society (though since I live in the state with the highest Aboriginal population, it may just be that this is what I see). We still have many, many problems to deal with, and on a day-to-day basis, it still looks like the same old thing: casual racism dropped throughout conversations in a horrifyingly similar manner to that in which pre-Civil War American Southerners would have spoken of their slaves. But we’re moving forward. Witness ‘Sorry Day’, when we finally did the right thing and apologised on behalf of our ancestors for kidnapping Aboriginal children in the 30s and creating the Silent Generation. Witness the slow growth of Aboriginal programs and the growing number of Aboriginal people in professional capacities.

To be brutal about it, the other side of the coin is that even if we white people don’t belong here, it is, plain and simple, just not practical to chuck every single white person out of the country so that the Aboriginal people can have their land back. Very few of them would want it that way, either. There are still groups of tribal Aboriginal people, but despite their problems with white attitudes, most Aboriginal people do prefer the beneficial side of the type of society we brought with us. In all honesty, and I’m not trying to be racist here, I’m simply stating facts: we provide most of their jobs, and our taxes pay most of their welfare. Again, I’m not trying to be racist. Aboriginal people make up 1 percent of the population: 200 000 of 20 million. It’s simple maths.

History marches on. The invasion has happened. What’s done is done–now that we’ve made the mess we’ve made, we’ve got to do our best to build something on top of what we’ve got left. We can’t always go on about  rights and justice when the simple fact is that life is messy. I can’t take back the fact that the society I love, that I live in, has a murky and clouded past. I can’t help being born here and loving this country, the land itself, right down to my bones. And I know there are people who will disagree fiercely with me about this, but I’ll say it anyway: in sentiment, Australia isn’t just Aboriginal land anymore. There are people here who are born and bred in this country, who will fight for it to the death, and they’re as white as white can be. I’m one of them. Aboriginal people have a solid claim to their history here. They have the right to be recognised as the traditional owners of the land, and indeed they should be. But nobody can deny that there is a culture, a national identity, and a whole new history intertwined with the story of this land. We weren’t there when Australia was invaded. We’re here now, and we have a claim here, too.

And that’s why I think that January 26th should be, if anything, more like ANZAC Day – a sobering day to reflect on the life we have here, the complicated history of bitterness and olive branches we have, and at what cost to its own people, of all races, that this nation came about. January the 26th should not play host to a light-hearted celebration that overshadows what really happened centuries ago, and gets people thinking deeply about their love of this nation–something that this date doesn’t really represent.

Unfortunately, Aboriginal rights weren’t a going concern in the first decade of the twentieth century. And since that was when January 26th began to be celebrated… well, let’s just say nobody was thinking about any of this back then. It’s highly unlikely that the date will be changed. I think it should be, but I don’t think it will happen.

To add a final anecdote: By law I have to be paid for a public holiday. Because I couldn’t go to work (and I would rather have), I wanted to do something for the community instead. So I got up at five in the morning and helped out with a free Rotary Club community Australia Day breakfast. An odd choice, considering how strongly I felt about this, but the only actual choice around. And besides, I’m not going to say people can’t celebrate their nation on a day they genuinely believe is for celebrating it, and even though I was facilitating it, I was also helping to ensure that people who didn’t get a good feed all the time actually got one that day. That’s a good cause.

At the time I thought that my pay for taking Australia Day off would be equivalent to blood money, but what I saw at that breakfast kind of changed my mind. There was a range of people from all races: African, Asian, Caucasian, and yes, plenty of Aboriginal people. All were celebrating Australian heritage as they saw it. At one point I looked up to see an Aboriginal woman giving a speech about her own national identity–publicly celebrating Australia Day. Since I wasn’t able to pay much attention to what was going on up the front (I know there was a banjo involved somewhere), I don’t know whether she was the token Aboriginal person for the event–but I do know that she wouldn’t have been up there if she personally hadn’t wanted to be. That’s not how we do things.

So we have racial tension to deal with. It is the elephant in the room for a lot of us. It is publically acknowledged with exquisite discomfort and shame at every possible function that might need it mentioned to be on the safe side. It is referenced subtly in any Aboriginal speech given to a room full of whitefellas. But I saw no protests yesterday. I saw no outrage. There would, of course, have been some somewhere, but that breakfast wasn’t feeling any effects. I saw a group of people all celebrating something they loved. The issues surrounding the date might have mattered to them, but they didn’t matter enough to visibly mar their own celebration and general enjoyment of the day. And the fact remains that the protesters over January 26th are in a definite minority. We can’t treat this as a massive social outrage, when, though it is an issue that needs to be sorted out, it isn’t a massive social outrage.

So I suppose I’m undecided as to whether or not I should make a definite decision not to celebrate Australia Day next time, and where the line is on celebration. I will still, however, help with some sort of community event, same time next year.

***

If you’re reading this, it’s statistically unlikely that you even come from the Southern Hemisphere, let alone from Australia. If you are, what do you think about Australia Day? If you’re Aboriginal, what do you think? Are you offended by anything I’ve said?

If you’re not Australian, what do you think about your country’s equivalent holiday/s? What about your own country’s murky past, and the racial tensions that people sometimes pretend don’t exist? I’d really like to know about more than my own little corner of the world.

Please keep from being offensive. Passionate declarations are allowed as long as they’re not intended to be overly inflammatory (a little bit of inflammatory I suppose is unavoidable). While I won’t delete or block you for differing in opinion with me, this is my blog and I’d like to keep it nice.

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