“Australia Day is our day,” everyone’s tennis hero John Newcombe said last week. “All we are doing is recognising how lucky we are to live in this country.”
But the Australia Day debate is not about whether we should celebrate nationhood, but when. Those objecting to the fuss over the 26th of January take no account of the history around that fateful day in 1788 when Captain Arthur Phillip unilaterally declared the land on which he stood to be part of the British Empire.
In the previous century, in much the same way, Britain added to its empire 13 colonies on the east coast of what is now the United States. Those colonies sparked a war with Britain when they declared their independence on 4 July 1776, a date all Americans now know as Independence Day.
In both the Australian and the American cases, Indigenous people had no part in the decisions made at that time. But the American rebels differed in that they rejected remote rule by a distant, unrepresentative government. Their declaration laid the basis for an independent nation.
Arthur Phillip’s declaration on 26 January 1788 was something else altogether. Far from proclaiming any sort of independence, it effectively laid down that the people already there would lose their independence. Their land stewardship, the basis of their ancient belief systems, would be revoked and the land given to a king on the other side of the world.
It wasn’t a nation that was founded at Port Jackson on 26 January. It was a colony of the Empire, which over subsequent decades, besides delivering cast-off felons by the shipload, imposed British law on the far more venerable First Nations land and justice systems. Britain used its law to determine unilaterally that Australia was uninhabited, giving cover to the Empire to allow First Nations people to be marginalised or hunted down and killed.
The toll was greatest in high-population regions, fertile country with the best food resources. In places like Tasmania’s Northern Midlands, Victoria’s Western Districts, the Murray Valley, the NSW Northern Rivers, the Brisbane Valley and many more besides, First Nations people were denied the material and spiritual support of the lands on which their culture was based.
It’s worth looking at how other countries have gone about establishing a national day. India shares our date, 26 January, but unlike us it made that choice because on that day in 1930 the Indian National Congress proclaimed independence from the British.
New Zealand’s big day is Waitangi Day on 4 February, when the country’s founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi between Britain and First Nations Maoris, was signed in 1840. Japan’s day, 11 February, is the date understood to be when the country’s first emperor was crowned in 660BC.
France celebrates the start of its revolution on 14 July, 1789, when rebellious subjects released the Bastille’s prisoners. Germany celebrates on 3 October, when the country’s western and eastern halves were united in 1990. And Mexico and other Latin American nations base their national days on key events in their wars of liberation from Spanish and Portuguese overlords in the early 1800s.
In all of these cases, dates of national celebration mark occasions of national empowerment, when a king was crowned or a treaty signed or lands brought together – or most often, when a people’s independence was asserted.
The arrival of the British did the exact opposite to Indigenous Australians. Their belief systems were truly independent, but they lost out to an empire that sought to dominate them, driven by an implacable belief in its superiority.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton declared on Australia Day that a Coalition government would ensure that “the days of being ashamed of Australia Day are over”, while Liberal deputy leader Sussan Ley talked up the success of the “daring experiment” of Australia’s settlement by the British.
The brazen settlement of our vast lands, across unfamiliar seas on the other side of the world, was remarkable, and no-one could be ashamed on an Australia Day that celebrates our success in bringing together multiple cultures and forging a stable, democratic and prosperous nation.
But all that is missing the point. There are hundreds of days in the year, numerous other anniversaries, when we could enjoy a good party. But to choose the day that marks Australia’s annexation by the British cannot avoid attention falling on what followed: the dispossession, murder and marginalisation of Indigenous people.
The 26th of January is an old habit we must break. If we don’t find a date that better represents our shared history and aspirations, our national day will be a permanent, weeping wound.