Each year as the Australia emerges from its summer slumber with the festival of jingoistic self-congratulation that is Australia Day, the Indigenous protests and vigils marking the Jan. 26 anniversary of British invasion become bigger and louder.
Invasion Day commemorations in some capital cities already rival in size and volume Anzac Day commemorations. And in decades to come, Invasion Day will still — as it will always — be commemorated on Jan. 26, whereas Australia’s supposedly inclusive and cohesive national day commemoration will not.
Across the country some councils are rethinking the very concept of having a national day of celebration and unification on the anniversary of the First Fleet’s arrival in Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, thus beginning the long, bloody process of invasion and dispossession.
Melbourne’s City of Yarra has determined to drop all references to Australia Day and, perhaps more importantly, to move its traditional citizenship ceremony — the moment when “new” Australians are officially inducted as compatriots — to another date. Instead there will be a ceremony marking the “loss of Indigenous culture” associated with Jan. 26.
It has always seemed a ridiculous anomaly that new Australian citizens are officially invited into the fold on a date that is so filled with sorrow and pain for this land’s custodians.
Those linked to the continent for the relative blink of an eye, some 230 years, get to do the welcoming on Jan. 26 while the fellas who have been here for 60,000 loathe the very day and scarcely get a say.
It was the fifth governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie — an Australian hero by all accounts, with monuments, harbors, streets, buildings and endless statuary dedicated to in his honor — who began the tradition of marking white, imperial, colonial self-congratulation on Jan. 26.
By the time in 1818 he began celebrating “foundation day,” the Eora had largely been dispossessed from their traditional lands and waters as Sydney spread.
Macquarie, an appalling piece of work even by the standards of his day, had ill-gotten a reputation for enlightenment for his treatment of the local Indigenes. It is a reputation that has largely endured thanks to the colonization of Australian history, even though he was essentially the father of stolen generations after setting up his “native institution” for children at Parramatta.
He also effectively declared war against the tribes around Appin in April 1816, ordering that: “Such natives as happen to be killed on such occasions, if grown up men, are to be hanged up on trees in conspicuous situations, to strike the survivors with the greater terror.”
Hanging bodies in public and decapitation (two of the male warriors killed, Kanabygal and Durell, and one female resister, had their heads cut off and sent to England as trophies) were a stock in trade tactic of the British colonists the globe over. We rightly reel at such terrible barbarism as it presents as an extremist tactic today, but it — and so much other extreme violence — was intrinsic to Indigenous dispossession and British colonial rule of the continent.
Macquarie chose Jan. 26 as the day to celebrate the foundation, but for the first locals, it began on Jan. 24, 1788.
That is when the Arthur Phillip’s fleet entered nearby Botany Bay, where it had a tense two-day standoff with the original locals, and left just as two French frigates, La Boussole and l’Astrolabe sailed in.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has made barely a mark on Indigenous policy and left even less impression on the hearts and minds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
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