I recently wrote an article suggesting we should be sensitive to the pain our choice of the date of Australia Day causes our original inhabitants. A friend replied that we can’t bow to the opinion/demands of every minority group and change the date. I noted that a people who’d been here 300 times longer than us is hardly just another minority group and offered the following parable. I haven’t heard from him since.
The Japanese didn’t make that fatal mistake of bombing Pearl Harbour. They invaded down the Asian peninsula and the US never entered the war. England and Russia, knowing that without American help they couldn’t possibly win, sued for peace. The Japanese, not bled dry by the war against the US in the Pacific, proceeded with the Japanese Navy’s plan to invade Australia at their chosen point, Point Stephens.
They quickly overran the Australian defences and declared Australia Japanese territory. They weren’t particularly kind, regarding us as barbarians. Those of us who survived the prison camps and mistreatment were allowed to continue living here but a huge Japanese migration program soon had Japanese outnumbering the very depleted survivors of the invasion by five to one, then 10 to one.
After a long delay we were reluctantly allowed to become Japanese citizens, although because the Japanese were very ethnocentric, most of us continued to suffer quite bad discrimination on the basis of our white skins. Because this discrimination was strongly evident in education and employment policies, most of us today are not nearly as wealthy as our invaders have become.
And because our invaders also treat us with scorn or condescension, most of us are psychologically scarred and can’t reach our full potential in any case. Some of us have retreated inland to escape the ignominy and are living in shanty towns. Our conquerors offer this as proof that we weren’t fitted to survive in the modern world in any case.
When we finally gather the courage to protest at what’s happened to us, our rulers are incredulous and disdainful. They list the great benefits of advanced technology they have delivered. This includes around Australia fast rail that travels at 350kph and other such technological wonders we couldn’t possibly have achieved given our bordering on primitive levels of technological development when they invaded.
They celebrate their acquisition of our wide brown land on the day they landed and planted the Japanese flag at Port Stephens, March 19. When the leaders of the remnants of our mob complain that it’s painful for this day to be our national day, as it reminds us that so many of our loved ones didn’t survive the invasion, our Japanese Prime Minister tells us to get over it – we’re only a minority after all.
Australia Day, 2021
David Williamson is an eminent Australian playwright.
Comments
27 responses to “Parable for Australia Day: rewriting history with Japanese as victors”
If we introduce a longevity quotient to citizenship we are no longer a democracy but a backward tribal system.
In a modern democracy we are all equal whether we can trace some or all of our ancestry back 300 hours, weeks, years or centuries. The hypothetical Japanese occupation remains, as always, irrelevant.
If we apply the longevity approach, then Australians with Aboriginal ancestry, regardless of how much, whether 100% or less than 1%, are top of the list – FIRST. This establishes a ladder effect of superior and inferior Australians. We become ranked Australians with superior ranging down through levels of inferior citizens.
For one thing, we have no idea if any of the many different peoples here in 1788 were descended from the first Homo Sapiens to migrate to what we now call Australia. If we gain that knowledge, there is our first longevity ladder through the 350 or so tribes/clans here in 1788, then through the ancestry percentage – 100% top of the list down to the less than one percenters. Following that are Australians without Aboriginal ancestry, accordingly ranked on another longevity ladder. To be accurate, this should also be divided into percentages, i.e. two parents with 100% longevity from 1788 outranks one 100 percenter and one 50 percenter. And so it would go along with our modern democracy.
Common sense and logic decree, if we accord ‘superior’ or special status to having Aboriginal ancestry on the basis that there is a superiority to peoples who lived here longer, then we are establishing a ladder effect for citizens, firstly with AWAA, where 100% gets you top rank and less than 1% gets you bottom of the ladder and then, following on, we have all other Australians, accordingly ranked in terms of how far they can trace back some of their ancestry, with the poor bugger who became a citizen yesterday, bottom of the list and the most inferior Australian.
To continue the parable, the Chinese then invade the Great Southern Land of Rising Sun and celebrate their day for centuries, until the Russian-US Alliance invade and celebrate their day and on that day no one can even remember the ‘Australians’ let alone the ‘First Australians’ because they’re just not relevant to the current regime. There might be a paragraph in the history books saying that a past culture even before the Great Southern Japanese had the eccentric notion of multiculturalism and attempting to respect the prehistoric indigenous peoples. But such fantastical ideals have thankfully been abandoned.
What is missing is the historical reality of the arrival of the British. If the Japanese, like them, worked to protect and preserve Australians, as the British did Aborigines, and gave them rights as citizens and poured billions into trying to solve any problems, as well as according greater rights and benefits to citizens with Australian ancestry, above and beyond that to which those descended from Japanese colonists have, would a Treaty be needed?
Is Mr Williamson aware that in law, if it is decided that the British invaded as opposed to settled, that Mabo and Land Rights become null and void?
Any reading of history also makes it clear the First Fleet with its half-starved convicts, many of them children and their half-starved gaolers bore no sane comparison to the Japanese military machine. The analogy does not work.
John Williamson re-imagining of the Japanese invasion of Australia makes powerful sense of the British invasion, but it can’t undo what has happened. What we need to find is a way forward to reconciliation. Perhaps that requires that we understand who ‘we Britons’ are.
Another way to view the place of the “Invasion” of Australia by British colonists in 1788, is to re-consider the deep history of invasion of the island home of the Britons, newly created by the retreating ice and rising sea level at the beginning of the last interglacial period. The builders of many wood and stone structures throughout the length of the island, starting in the north and culminating in the engineering feat of Stonehenge must have been extraordinary people. But their homelands were invaded by the Celts who appear to have extinguished the language and virtually all of the stone builders’ culture, so that by the time the Romans arrived in 55 BC, the Druid priests claimed no knowledge of the Stonehenge builders. After the Romans ‘civilized’ much of Britain, the next invasion involved Germanic tribes, the Angles Saxons and Jutes, followed by Vikings and finally the Norman French. ‘England’ was the product of a mish-mash of languages and diverse European culture, which occasionally confronts us through the words we share with Danes, Germans, French, and Italians. Yet at the base, DNA studies reveal enduring connections to the Ancient Briton stone age builders.
Any notion of a deep, enduring culture wedded to the unique biology and geography of their homeland seems would appear to be lost forever. Small wonder that those of us who came from Britain found the First Peoples of Australia ‘incomprehensible’. Sadly, we had no interest in knowing what we were destroying before it was shredded, just as those who conquered Britain trampled on the traditions and the special knowledge of their lands. We have lost our own heritage, let us make an effort to avoid repeating that mistake.
It is not too late to celebrate what remains of that unique aboriginal knowledge, culture and language, and integrate them into what it means to be ‘Australian’ in the 21st Century.
Should we worry about changing the date on which we celebrate the beginning of the modern era of Australian history? We’ll never find a better date, or a less painful one for the victims of the invasion, so we should learn to live with what is, and concentrate on creating a better future.
Hello David, thank you for taking our imagination to an alternative reality. Without a treaty, what would be the legal status of a Japanese judicial system on non-Japanese citizens? Would it be like that of Nazi occupied Europe – criminal thuggery of might is right? Would incarcerated descendants of the First Fleet be prisoners of war? Should they, as resistance fighters, take up the armed struggle come under the Judaic-Christian definition of a just war? Of course, in the alternative reality our discussions would be in Japanese, we would be concerned Japanese citizens with maybe a touch of collective guilt. Shouldn’t one of “us” ask one of “them” for what “they”
think?
You could also add the ‘Japanese viruses’ that decimated many white Australians after the Japanese arrival and colonisation.
And you could add those atrocities that Japan perpetrated on China during Japan’s occupation, including but not limited to extensive human biological experiments.
After reading this, my previous opinion has been completely and utterly turned on it’s head. Thank you for demonstrating to me how shallow my thinking has been about the dispossession of the original inhabitants caused by my own race. I feel ashamed that I ever held those views. Thank you.
Sir, I think the story is not complete without mentioning the taking away of EuroJapanese children from their mothers to be raised by Japanese families as servants for Japanese households. It would be considered a favour to them because the EuroJapanese children would be bestowed the civilising influence of Japanese culture.
Good point
Excellent piece, David. Succinct and devastating.
I wonder why we bother to have an ‘Australia Day’ at all. It’s a non-event except for the ever-increasing ‘Invasion Day’ frissons and tensions, which give one something actually to feel strongly about, and participate in. When pressed, I’ve always said ‘We haven’t had our real Australia Day yet; it will only come with the declaration of a republic’. So long as it isn’t engineered to fall on Jan26. Would that be respected or accepted by the indigenous Australians, throwing off finally the imperial yoke? Perhaps the only reason to have a national day at all is the assuagement of historic indigenous grievances; I can’t think of anything more important for the ‘nation’. So the celebration of a genuine Treaty and/or the ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament’ might be a good alternative to the republic, and could even be more achievable despite the continuous and dishonest rearguard defence carried on by the present government.
The parable is worth thinking about but it doesn’t address the question of when or whether we should have a national day called Australia Day. Everyone is concentrating of the divisive aspects of the date, and they’re important. But, just about every other date that has been suggested will have its detractors, not least because any fixed date for a holiday will cause problems for employers and employees. And, while almost any date would work for civic ceremonies, many dates such as in winter or mid-term have their seasonal or sessional downsides. Surely we want an Australia Day that is meaningful for all of us, or at least one that doesn’t attract too many people with axes to grind. Surely ,we want a national [holi] day that unites rather than divides us. So: why not a day tacked on to the weekend end of the summer holiday season or beginning of the school year, ie the last Friday or Monday in January. Let’s cast aside our divisions for one weekend in the year.
Brilliant.
Earlier this week, I drew a similar analogy (independently of Mr Williamson’s article) regarding a successful Japanese victorious occupier declaring Australia Day to be the day they landed in 1942 in a comment submitted to The Age. Of course, the mods rejected it.
Yeah, ‘Independent Always’ at the top of the front page means independent of any meaningful criticism of Liberal government or Australian nationalist bigotry these days.
I wrote suggesting that, in the light of what has been happening with Trump, Brexit and Covid, every day is an Australia Day. If the purpose of 26 January is to have an excuse for a public holiday to mark the end of the summer holidays, why not call it Bank Holiday like the Brits do and offend no one. That did not see the light of day either.
Your friend understood what it means for the Boot to be on the other foot.
This is too, too good! I love it that you’ve set the invasion point at Port Stephens having lived there myself for a ten-year period (teaching) during which I initiated the teaching of Japanese at the then Nelson Bay High – had two years as an official NSW exchange teacher to a part of Western Japan – and then left after a brief period of two years back at NBHS – for a further 14 years in another part of western Honshū. Nice little ironies – along with distant familial links to Worimi First Nations people of the Port Stephens area – and having been shown a place of early 19th century massacre at Soldiers Point (not part of Lyndall Ryan’s Mapping the Massacres project, btw). High Ground – the new movie with Simon Baker, Jack Thompson and Jacob Junior Nayinggul set in the last years of the Massacres of Arnhem Land (1919-1931) suggests something of your point of invasion, take-over, a different law imposed – and the grievance never disappearing – even under the onslaught of epithet and discrimination. It’s time to change the date, the flag, the national song – and for a Voice, a Treaty and the Truth!
Jim Port Stephens was the actual invasion point planned by the Japanese Navy. Only the losses at Midway and the Coral Sea stopped it happening
Thanks David. Could you provide the source for that Imperial Japanese Naval plan to launch an invasion at/on Port Stephens…?
EXACTLY! And think of Pauline Hanson on immigration.
Brilliant! Thank you.
Yes, the choice of 26 January as Australia Day was insensitive. But the date is the least of the problems. The objections, the protests, the antisocial outcomes arise from not only the invasion but the racial repression, racial discrimination and deaths in custody.
To move the date now would only add another date for protests. 26 January representing the invasion, 26 May for Sorry Day and the new Australia II day.
The much greater issue is the irrelevance of our historic ties to British governance. The Republic is long overdue and its creation presents the opportunity to correct the date.
“The Republic is long overdue and its creation presents the opportunity to correct the date.”
This is the best answer to the Australia Day question I have heard. A Republic would, of necessity, include all of us, and its establishment would draw a line under the preceding 250 years of colonial status.
And of course all Australians would understand and obey Japanese law because they willingly submitted to the Japanese takeover, and immediately understood its purpose – this while being forced off their suburban land, losing their jobs, and having their way of living utterly destroyed.
Brilliant, however you cut it. Williamson gets Order of Australia or KCMG is that is still available.
Probably more likely to get a secret trial for thought crimes.