Life on the West Island A national day?

What is the rationale and intent for a national day?

Our Kiwi cousins officially state that their national day…is there to remind us of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on the 6th February 1840. This was the treaty between the British Crown and more than 500 Māori chiefs.

The Canadian government proclaims that their national day is… to promote national unity, the country’s heritage, and Canadian values like multiculturalism and bilingualism.

In the United States of America, Independence Day is a federal holiday that
…commemorates the passage of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 [which] declared the 13 colonies to be free and independent from Great Britain.

On the West Island, we are told that… Australia Day, 26 January, is a day for Australians to reflect on what it means to be Australian, to celebrate contemporary Australia and to acknowledge Australian history. While national days in other similar countries are mostly times of civic pride and celebration, the stated purpose of the West Island’s “national day” is now resulting in division, dispute and angry confrontations.

This might go right back to the date which was chosen, which was not when the nation achieved unity and independence, or even the date on which the British colony was proclaimed at Sydney Cove. 26 January 1788 was in fact the date on which the First Fleet landed a large contingent of British convicts and soldiers on West Island shores.

For this reason, the ultimate choice of the date of “Australia Day” has been contentious and divisive, since it was the day on which the white colony of New South Wales was settled, but it is, and never was, a date of true significance. In fact, the colony celebrated “Foundation Day” and later “Anniversary Day” on July 30. Other colonies did not recognise that date and held celebrations of their colonial settlement at different times.

In South Australia, for instance, state celebrations of Proclamation Day on December 28 take precedence over any supposed “national day.” That also means that Boxing Day is not a holiday, due to its closeness to the date of the state’s “national holiday.”

No state other than New South Wales links any of its indigenous or colonial history to January 26, yet many West Islanders seem to believe that to have been a national day since 1788, which is not the case. Recent research by a team of academics from Deakin University highlights that “Australia” as a nation only came into being in 1901 and that the current date for Australia Day was really only finalised in 1994. For 59 years before that, a national holiday was celebrated on a Monday on or around January 26, making a nonsense of the idea that the actual date had a particular meaning for the nation. Can you imagine Americans holding Independence Day celebrations sometime in the first week of July, or the French celebrating Bastille Day on a Monday a few days after July 14?

For many years, our “national day” was on 24 May, Empire Day. Melbourne University historian Benjamin T Jones reports that the day was... a celebration of Britishness held by people who largely identified as Australian Britons.

The choosing of 26 January has been controversial and divisive since at least 1938, when First Nations peoples declared it to be a national day of mourning. More recently, they have come to know it as Invasion Day or Survival Day. It has become a day of division rather than national unity, with large and growing protests from West Islanders who regard it as an insult to the First Nations peoples who were massacred and dispossessed by white colonists under the false belief fostered by Captain Cook that the island continent was terra nullius before the arrival of the white man.

There have been many suggestions for more appropriate alternative dates for national commemoration and celebration which might overcome the divisiveness of the current date. These include:

• 1 January – the date on which the Federation was proclaimed in 1901;
• 13 February – anniversary of the parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations;
• 26 May – Sorry Day;
• 27 May – anniversary of the historic 1967 referendum;
• 3 June – anniversary of the Mabo land rights judgement;
• 9 July – date on which Queen Victoria consented to the Commonwealth of Australia Act;
• 13 September – anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples;
• 3 December – commemorating the popular democratic uprising at Eureka Stockade.

While there might be sound arguments for any one of these dates, the issue which remains is whether they would still be divisive. Recent research shows that support for a national day on 26 January is in steady decline and that a majority of the West Island public supports a change to the date. But a very significant minority wishes to keep the current date. Unfortunately, their cause is being championed by some radical groups, including neo-Nazis, outspoken white racists and extremist misogynists, who staged violent and confronting protests this week, carrying banners including AUSTRALIA FOR THE WHITE MAN, the slogan which was promoted for many years in support of the White Australia Policy and was the motto on the masthead of the popular magazine The Bulletin.

Given that we cannot seem to agree that we need a national day to reflect on “what it means to be an Australian,” perhaps West Islanders should just abandon the entire idea and not have a national holiday?

Meanwhile, the High Court has been handed the unenviable task of deciding just what are “Australian values,” so as to determine whether asylum seekers should be released into the community or kept in indefinite detention, just in case they might commit an offence in future. If the Court can actually reach a determination on this knotty problem, perhaps it could form the basis of a plan for what we actually celebrate on the West Island’s national day?