With each passing year, this one fraught day of the year becomes harder for politicians, especially progressives, to defend as that on which Australia self-congratulates itself and celebrates nationhood.
Progressive leaders concerned about the potential cultural pushback of altogether abandoning 26 January as the national moment have long been recasting it from one of celebratory hubris into a far more sombre memorialisation of how the first fleet so detrimentally collided with a timeless First Nations civilisation.
No matter how indignantly the woke-as-a-pejorative crowd screech on their op-ed pages and rant into those lonely late-evening airwaves about the politically correct trying to steal their day, the cultural tide is ebbing fast.
When the captain of the Australian X1, the most respected sporting position in Australia, so eloquently and simply articulates a position as a proud nationalist and change proponent, as Pat Cummins did this week, the self-aware would recognise 26 January was getting ever further up creek with no paddle.
“I absolutely love Australia. It’s the best country in the world by a mile. We should have an Australia Day, but we can probably find a more appropriate day to celebrate it,” Cummins said.
Cummins went on to mention history (he’s clearly done the work of too few non-Indigenous people). But unsaid was what he implied. For 26 January 1788 was the day of the apocalypse for Indigenous Australians for whom the dire generational legacies of violent dispossession continue to resoundingly reverberate.
Cummins is not some social radical. He’s at the apex of one of Australia’s most traditional institutions. But even conservative Cricket Australia has been progressively dropping references to “Australia Day’’ (beginning in 2021) on its 26 January fixtures as it will again this year when Australia plays the West Indies in the second test.
If you turn the cricket off in disgust at how it is reflecting – or leading – cultural change (harrumph – woke nonsense!), you can always follow the money instead.
For that is what Woolworths did this year when it discontinued its usual Australia Day range of foreign-produced plastic paraphernalia (think giant Aussie thongs, flags and other assorted shite) that end up in landfill every 27 January.
This was purely, Woolworths CEO Bradford Banducci insisted, a commercial decision; the public call for such rubbish has diminished. From where I sit, when uber capitalism starts to so acutely ape cultural direction, it’s definitely time to take notice.
Which is perhaps why the woke-as-pejorative lot cheerleader, the federal opposition leader, seemed to tie himself in such ideologically tricky knots of outrage. Why else would an avowed free-marketeer and purported defender of free speech call for a boycott of Woolworths, insisting it was acting against the national interest (stop rolling round on the floor)? Unless, of course, what’s said about him and belief really is true.
Meanwhile, did you hear about the wildly successful and hardy perennial campaign to make barbecuing and sharing lamb on 26 January a thing of national togetherness? Traditionally the expensive high-production, humorous ads have mentioned Australia Day to underscore the supposed patriotism of lamb consumption.
Not this year. As always, the ads are imbued with patriotism, and the mending of societal fences and division (incongruously, given Australia has just said a resounding “no” to Indigenous constitutional recognition). But again, no mention of Australia Day. Is that the delicious aroma of barbecuing lamb … or money? Australia Day is on the nose.
Here it’s worth remembering that pastoral expansion through violent dispossession of Indigenous custodians for the production of livestock was the very sharp end of British colonial ambition in Australia. Colonial pastoral pioneering is a revered part of this continent’s narrative of benign settlement, its true discomfiting history too often overlooked.
Stock – their theft by Black people and Indigenous resistance to pastoral expansion on traditional lands – triggered the killings of countless Indigenous people (and many pastoralists).
And while we are on overlooked history this Invasion/Australia Day, here’s a couple more things to ponder.
First, you’ll probably hear an awful lot about Arthur Phillip today, not least about his supposed enlightenment regarding the indigenes, and the pride and personal importance to him of his colonial project in what grew from New South Wales to become Australia. The truth is that Phillip (as illustrated by historian Kate Fullagar in her recent book on the first governor and Bennelong) was a very sharp instrument of the colonial project, not so enlightened, and later gave not too much of a fig about his time in the great southern land.
Second, 2024 is the bicentenary of the establishment of the NSW Legislative Council, appointed to advise the governor (then Thomas Brisbane) on British colonial legislative matters. It grew into the later elected bicameral NSW parliament, the first on the continent.
As NSW upper house MP Jeremy Buckingham points out, next 14 August will mark 200 years since “the colonial government’s declaration of martial law west of the Blue Mountains on the Wiradjuri nation” in the “Bathurst wars’’, which massacred by poisoning, beating and shooting hundreds of Wiradjuri.
“Eleven days after the Declaration of Martial law, the first meeting of the Legislative Council was held . . . The very first decision of the NSW Legislative Council was to appoint Lieutenant Governor Colonel William Stewart, who was integral to the formation and ultimately led the New South Wales Mounted Police who enforced British rule on the Wiradjuri Nation and Aboriginal nations across the colony,” Buckingham said.
Racism is undeniably at the heart of the colonial project, so many will celebrate with blithe indifference to Indigenous sensibilities on Friday. Just as it was the bedrock of the Australian federation in 1901, whose first commonwealth act was the white Australia legislation.
For now the date remains rigidly the same while so much else moves on around it.
Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
