By choosing to stick with January 26 (1788) as Australia’s National Day, conservatives are celebrating a date that highlights the very worst of British imperialism – a ‘rule of law’ belonging to a tiny aristocratic oligarchy with a vicious criminal code defending private property through capital punishment and transportation.
Australia Day has come and gone again and still no resolution to recurring problems with the official choice of January 26th. Well-tried arguments re-emerge; old combatants re-engage. But several things are clear. The controversy will not go away. The movement to change the date is stronger than ever. Rallies all over the country are large, varied and passionate. Meanwhile, supporters of the status quo invariably conflate support for a national day with their fixation on the 26th ; on the date rather than the day.
The rally in Hobart in the gardens fronting Parliament House was larger than ever and more varied in social composition and demographics. Well over half the crowd, through a show of hands, indicated they were attending for the first time. Prominent politicians, trade union leaders, the Anglican bishop, and Hobart’s Lord Mayor were on the list of speakers along with Indigenous activists. A common theme was that Canberra was not hearing the eminently sound arguments.
The intellectual dissonance was highlighted when the rally got under way at noon. Two minutes of silence was disrupted by the sound of distant artillery fire as the official national salute boomed across the city. It was not the most thoughtful way to mark the occasion.
Similar artillery fire had echoed across the Derwent in February 1804 when Hobart’s ‘first fleet’ had arrived, and then again a few months later when the soldiers of the New South Wales Corp fired their cannon to ward off an attack by the warriors of the Oyster Bay nation who were threatening the small settlement at Risdon on the river’s eastern shore.
This year’s debate further exposed the oddity of the conservative cause, which would be particularly apparent to outsiders. For many countries that commemorate significant historical events, the date of independence from colonial rule is a key one. The clear message conveyed by Australia Day is that during two centuries of settlement nothing can match the significance of the arrival of a fleet of ships carrying 700 convicts cast out as human refuse.
Clearly, the motivation is to reaffirm our British heritage. That is not in itself unreasonable. But why choose 1788? Especially when the fleet’s arrival illustrated British imperialism at its very worst.
Meanwhile, the case for the prosecution overflows. The ‘rule of law’ that arrived with the fleet was the law of a tiny aristocratic oligarchy with a vicious criminal code defending private property with capital punishment and transportation. Britain was still deeply involved in the slave trade. The tragic decision to claim sovereignty and property over half a continent had no basis in either international or common law at the time.
It was a monstrous and unconscionable usurpation that predetermined the violence which was to run like a dark thread through Australian life for generations. The likely outcome was understood at the time. Jeremy Bentham observed that New South Wales had been annexed without any treaties with the First Nations. It was, he believed, an egregious fault that could never be remedied.
Clearly, the passions swirling around the national day reflect deeper currents of opinion. The nature of modern Australia is in question. How British are we? Do our traditions and institutions owe more to our colonial history than to Imperial oversight? Were they locally made or shipped in from the northern hemisphere? Many of our anglophile conservatives seem to have little knowledge and even less respect for locally developed ways of doing things.
Our inability to consummate the process of decolonisation is there for the world to see. Most countries wonder why Australia is still comfortable with a situation where the British queen remains our head of state. They must look on with bemusement when our patriots wrap themselves in the Australian flag when, in the words of the Flag Act of 1953, it is the British blue ensign; that is, the flag of a colony rather than an independent nation.
Even the constituent parts of the United Kingdom — Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and the Shetland Islands have their own distinctive flags.
The events dear to conservative Australia are telling. Alongside Australia Day we have our deep official engagement with the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage along the east coast in 1770, the elaborate celebration of which was cancelled at the last minute due to Covid.
And then there is Anzac Day commemorating Australia’s engagement in an Imperial campaign against an enemy that could never have presented a threat to the homeland.
These are all moments of Imperial, not national, history. At the same time, we still find it difficult to give full and official recognition to the warriors of the First Nations who died fighting for their kin, their customs and their country. We fail to see that they fell in what by any fair measure was our most important war fought in Australia about the ownership and control of land across great continental distances.
The most constant argument of defenders of January 26 is that it is a moment capable of bringing us all together. But our conservative countrymen cannot achieve that goal, joined as they are at one hip to Mother England and at the other to Uncle Sam. They cannot hold together their veneration for our British heritage with the acceptance of the profound moral culpability of the Imperial government in the deep tragedy of the destruction of Aboriginal society.
The decisive change we must look for is the realisation that the men and women of the First Nations and the convicts were both victims of British imperialism. The nature and intensity of their suffering differed but the convicts did not choose to be foot soldiers in an invading horde even when they were forced to march in time with the British-inspired conquest.
For their part, the free settlers and the growing population of locally born children had little capacity to influence the structure of the law or the shaping of policy that until the second half of the 19th century was determined in London and administered by Imperial officials.
Henry Reynolds is an eminent Australian historian.
Comments
15 responses to “Australian ‘patriots’ wrap themselves in the flag of a colony”
Jan 26th as the ‘national day’ was long promoted by the ‘white supremacist ‘ and xenophobic ‘Australian Natives Association’ (people born in Australia of ‘white’ British heritage). The ANA proposed that ‘Australia Day’ would celebrate “the birth of a new white nation in the Southern Seas”.
See: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/52253268?
Fun fact: Denmark has no ‘national day’ and neither does the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’.
“it is the British blue ensign”
Specifically Australia’s ‘national flag’ is a ‘defaced British blue ensign’ (the stars are the defacement).
Entropy and it’s social analogue of muddle and uncertainty challenges us: how to organise into the future all those with history in Australia since 1788. Your presentation is a plus.
We can never have a complete reversal or re-run of history but must look for moments of ‘constructive novelty’ as such have characterised the whole biosphere’s journey till now. So why not ‘Challenge Australia Day’ – 26 January, and commitment to an ongoing quest for true humanisation that draws on multi-cultural experience, remembering that ‘execution never fully realised intentions’.
Thanks for this article Henry, which brings together a number of historically-based arguments as to why 26th January should not be Australia’s national day.
Meanwhile the juxtaposition of what occurred in the Hobart gardens this year, a communitarian event, with the official gun salute at the same time a few kilometres away, was repeated around Australia’s capitals.
On the morning if 26th this year, I watched the NITV First People’s broadcast event from Coolangatta at which Kerry O’Brien was recognised with the honorific title of ‘Uncle Kerry’. Switching channels to the ABC, albeit briefly, was the same contrast as in Hobart, a direct telecast of the raising of the Australian flag ceremony, complete with hundreds of military personnel.
Therein, it seems lies this tradition that goes back to 1788, and the British empire’s fundamental belief that political power was premised on military superiority in their acquisition of new lands, and the subjugation of the peoples who lived in these lands.
Not a tradition I wish to endorse as a marker for Australian national sovereignty, but not something we should forget either.
Great write up. “… But our conservative countrymen cannot achieve that goal (of unity), joined as they are at one hip to Mother England and at the other to Uncle Sam”.
Australia will never achieve legitimacy as a country until it makes full amends to the Aboriginal people who have lived in this continent since year dot.
A white colonial outpost far away from the imperial centre will always desperately need big power protection. When we are able to celebrate our continent’s Aboriginal people and cultures, we won’t need to look over our shoulders as to who else are coveting this land. We will be legit!
The 26th January can continue to be recognised as Invasion Day and given over to commemoration by our First Nation’s people. Australia Day should be the day we become a republic, at which time we should enact an amended constitution and a new flag.
Why not just keep to the facts on what happened that day. The British set up a penal colony because they lost the war, could no longer dump them in America. The seed was planted for the nation we have become. Mainly from the early labour of the convicts who found themselves on those ships.
On the same day, the first people seen themselves losing their lands, society & lore. They died by the diseases the ships bought with them. They were killed, forced off their lands. As time went on, they were confined to reserves, no longer seen as noble salvagers, expected to die out.
The above is both true. We can be a great nation; one we can be proud of. This can only be if we recognise the price the first people paid. Reparation has to be made for past wrongs. They are asking for no more, deserve no less.
There is opinion that the decision to colonise ‘New South Wales’ was influenced by motives beyond just a ‘dump’ for convicts.
https://www.hausarbeiten.de/document/152483
Jan 26th 1788 is but one of many ‘invasion days’ suffered by the Indigenous People of the continent now known as ‘Australia’ in different parts and times.
For the terminally nostalgic First Fleeters who run this country, all three are to be fiercely defended – British head of state, flag, and national day. Moving the date is scant Indigenous “recognition” as long as our head of state remains as the white hereditary leader of the Church of England.
One thing at a time.
Gough Whitlam made Betty Windsor (nee Saxe Coburg-Gotha), ‘Queen of Australia’ in 1973.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2004A00044
US comedian Jerry Seinfeld to an Australian audience: “I love your flag; Britain by night.”
In the TV series ‘House M.D.’ Dr. Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurie) inquires of one of his associates, “have I upset your British sensibilities?”, who then replies “I’m nor British, I’m Australian”.
To which House rejoins, “The Queen is on your money. You’re British!”
It is important to identify the mechanics behind this country and look at their primary motive which is of course money. Look directly at the legal profession encompassing its ultimate power base the judiciary. If as in Australia the very fabric of the law is devoid of respect for family or for community and the country is run like a naval ship on a pirating mission, the ones running the ship, That is those who create, administer and interpret our laws are not bound to respect community or family because they have not woven that respect into the nations laws. It would be against their interests and the exploitive industries who benefit from their services by paying their exorbitant fees. Mind you those inflated legal fees simultaneously plunder the assets of families who are unfortunate in coming within its grasp, while also preventing our communities from entering into litigation because of the prohibitive costs.