It seems the safest thing to say.
Like most institutions these days – think the Liberal Party and the Catholic Church, just for starters – our nation seems hopelessly divided and descending into cold civil war. On just about every issue you can think of, there seem to be two semi-armed camps with little interest in compromise and a total war mindset. From Aboriginal affairs and energy policy to climate emergencies and Covid vaccines, it is pistols at dawn. Take no prisoners. Never sue for peace. Never accept defeat, even on issues that seem to have been well and truly settled. Like the endless broken record that is the republic.
Australia Day has become well and truly caught up in the warfare. Every other day seems to be Aborigines Day now. You would think they and their numerous and vociferous champions might give us one day per year. An Aussie Festivus for the rest of us. For the record, I have never been that enamoured of celebrating AD on 26 January. It seems to me that 26 January is Sydney Day. I have never understood why, say, a Victorian, would get remotely excited about 26 January, which commemorates the day Arthur Phillip and a bunch of (mostly petty) criminals came ashore at Sydney Cove. (My great, great, great grandfather, Pierce Collits, who arrived in 1801, got seven years for receiving a very minor amount of stolen calico). A more unifying date for celebrating our nationhood, for both Aborigines and non-Aborigines alike, would be 1 January, the day in 1901 that we became one nation. Before that, we were a bunch of colonies. (Some might argue, after the experience of ludicrous border closures during Covid, that we still are a bunch of colonies). But don’t expect those who favour 1 January to shout it too loudly in these dark (no pun intended) times. To do so would be seen as a victory for the self-important Aboriginal industry, and who among the deplorables wants that? And does anyone believe that the AD wars would end if the date were moved? Angry discussion of the perceived crime of “invasion” would simply move to another day. Whatever the date, the act of invasion will never, ever be forgiven.
Mind you, this sense of embedded social conflict over things like our national day may simply be a false impression one gets from the chattering classes, the dripping wets – as we used to call the woke – and those with group-based axes to grind, who delight in engaging in iconoclasm and in fomenting rebellion. They speak very often and very loudly, and you cannot turn on a radio or read a news report without hearing from them. You might say they have a voice. Out there in normal-land, where people gather for barbecues and such and generally enjoy fellowship on 26 January – some people even dare to fly a flag, which these days might well be seen as a revolutionary (or possibly a racist) act – these debates probably seem very remote and very arcane.
It isn’t that straightforward, though.
Australia Day has become a key battleground in the wars, and, more importantly, cultural symbols are important for free peoples, and the remote debates over them do affect ordinary people and ordinary lives. In workplaces, for example, you will increasingly be given a choice as to whether you want to take the holiday, even though you maybe don’t have a choice as to whether you take the Covid jab. (As an aside, I always thought that republicans should be forced to go to work on the Queen’s (King’s) birthday). Councils are now refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies on AD. Aboriginal invasion day protests are clogging up streets and open spaces. The ABC even helpfully publishes all the times and places of Invasion Day rallies on its web site. God knows what today’s schoolchildren are told to think about AD. All these things diminish the event and all that it signifies. That is, of course, the intention of those who set out to destroy what they see as the evil of patriotism, another scalp for those who want the whole show to come crushing down, to be rebuilt from the ground up, in their image. Just like faith and family, nation is to be obliterated by the cultural revolutionaries and their useful idiots in the agenda-setting institutions who increasingly determine the content of our lives. The gloves are off, and we are in a war that the other side does not intend to give up on, or lose.
Should we change the name of AD as well as the date?
Invasion Day? I don’t buy it. It was hardly an invasion, on most definitions of that word. By the standards of historical invasions, and countries have been invading other countries since Noah was loading up the ark, this was no invasion. If an invasion, it was certainly a pretty benign invasion, given the relative lack of violence that ensued, the massive benefits to the Indigenous of the Brits’ arrival (described below), the subsequent inclusion of Aborigines in the economy and social and political life – yes, this took a long time – and the generous though often misplaced efforts of British governors then Australian governments to right the wrongs of colonial life and give Aborigines positive discrimination.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/01/the-blessings-of-a-particularly-benign-invasion/
Occupation Day? It was certainly an occupation, of sorts. From the perspective of the British government in 1788, it was experimental, contingent, in no way assumed to be permanent. It was the solution to a domestic problem – overcrowded prisons. Typical of the way governments think and behave. The colony lasted, against the odds. Ultimately it prospered, warts and all. It has taken two hundred plus years to get right the relationship between the increasingly less British rulers and the locals.
And if wasn’t the British, it would have been someone else. (The Maori took the very rational decision to pick the Brits over the French at the Treaty of Waitangi, so enabling them to trade globally and to advance their economic position. They are still accruing the benefits of their incredible foresight). It was, after all, the age of imperialism, and no one on God’s earth can unsee that. I was always taken with the late Frank Devine’s line, uttered at the time of the tedious sorry debates, that the Aborigines should just forgive us. It won’t happen, of course. Victimhood offers far too many rewards, as we can see from the absolute explosion of self-identifying Indigenous in recent times. Everyone now wants to so identify. One of the rewards is endless moral superiority, along with all the grants and other material perks.
The whole notion of “first nations” on which the claim of occupation has been built is a post-hoc construct that does not fit the facts of the people who previously had occupied a few parts of the continent, despite the currency. The notion of terra nullius, though much disputed by the same chattering classes referred to above, has considerable force.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/history-wars/2005/12/the-invention-of-terra-nullius/
But let us stipulate that the land down under was occupied on 26 January 1788. We might still want to ask the question, what do Aborigines think now about the fruits of the British occupation. I say “the fruits”. I do not mean the justice of it. As I say, that is a question whose ultimate futility should be obvious to all. Here we can usefully employ the philosophical method of the eminent late twentieth century American thinker, John Rawls. Rawls termed his version of the state of nature, which political philosophers had, for centuries, used to determine the best form of governance, the “original position” under a “veil of ignorance”. It is all about ‘consent” and an implied social contract between the governors and the governed. In other words, what type of government would a rational individual not knowing his future circumstances choose to live under?
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/aborigines/2022/10/john-rawls-and-the-aboriginal-question/
What might an Aborigine in 1787 have chosen to be his future circumstances?
Continued hunting and gathering? Or something better? Don’t give me the nonsense about sophisticated agriculture spouted by Bruce Pascoe. The Aboriginal economy profited massively from the arrival of the industrial-revolutionaries from the north. Not every Aboriginal life was materially improved quickly, of course. Yet two centuries later, the large majority of Indigenous people are doing well economically. As Gary Johns has pointed out in his recent book, The Burden of Culture.
Aboriginal innovation was minimal by international standards. Western ideas, totally foreign to the Indigenous Australians, of course, have had their advantages, surely. For those progressives who, by definition, see the march of history as one of endless progress, both material and moral, it is a little odd to take the side of the noble savage over the more sophisticated moderns. And endlessly to cheer on a culture that, on any reasonable assessment, was (and in many parts, is) patriarchal, misogynist, abusive and violent.
What about giving up sovereignty, though? Was that element of the implied Rawlsian bargain worth it? Aborigines didn’t get to vote till 1962, but they do, as individuals, have more of a say in the way they are governed than they did in 1787. They don’t get everything they want – assuming they agreed with one another about what they wanted – but neither do other Australians.
No, I am not convinced that the Aborigine of 1787 would have chosen more of the same life.
In which case, I wonder how many Aborigines who just live their lives quietly each day and year and who don’t go in for the revolutionary politics of their loudly-voiced betters might be given to thinking, on 26 January each year, that whitey life isn’t too bad, and has delivered multiple advantages for them and their clans. Or perhaps they all do hate their lot and blame you and me for it. And will do so forever. To those I would simply say, Happy 26th of January.
We all get to live the lives that are placed in front of us. And only those lives. I don’t get to lament what might have been, two centuries ago, if only X and not Y had happened. I don’t get to claim the mantle of group rights, and stake claims against the crimes perpetrated against my Irish forebears by the awful English. All sorts of groups have suffered injustices. To choose randomly:
· The Huguenots were thoroughly rogered by French Catholics.
· The little girls of Rotherham were groomed and raped by Muslim men.
· English Catholics were shunned for centuries after Henry the Eighth (the other Harry).
· Postwar Italian migrants to Australia were called wogs.
· The Russian and French monarchs of the day were slaughtered by ignoble thugs who assumed the mantle of just revolution.
· Europe had its Hitler. Then its Stalin. When all it wanted was Churchill and de Gaulle.
· Britain got Brussels.
· Europe got an invasion from the Third World, in an act of reverse colonialism payback, and the Europeans continue to pay for the sins of their imperialist forebears.
· Before Constantine, Roman Christians were eaten by lions and watched by cheering heathens.
· Hiroshima and Nagasaki got obliterated by two bombs.
· Cambodia was bombed almost out of existence on the watch of Nixon and Kissinger.
· The Jews have been copping it from everyone, everywhere they find themselves.
· Hong Kong was delivered into the hands of tyrants.
· Taiwan cringes in daily fear of a Communist Chinese invasion.
· The unemployed unvaccinated await justice.
· The Covid gauleiters still walk free. They should be in prison.
· The late George Pell should not have been.
Yes, the history of the world is a history of greater and lesser, unresolved injustices. And of not much else.
By good fortune and a little liberalism on our part, Australia dodged much of this. Two centuries of relative peace and harmony are now up for grabs, as those with an interest in subverting our history and heritage, imperfect as it has been, set out to divide our people and destroy our culture, one institution at a time.
Half a century back, Anzac Day was under siege from the usual suspects. Alan Seymour rote a play about it called The One Day of the Year. That was about our warmongering. Declared to be “over”, Anzac Day subsequently made an almighty comeback. Will Australia Day?
Paul Collits
26 January 2023
Paul I genuinely love your work, but a couple of points 1. The first fleet arrived between the 20-23 Jan 1788 . The 26 th January marks the day during a labour prime minister in the 30’s that we ceased being British citizens and became Australian citizens. Nothing to do with first fleet arrival or invasion day. 2 aboriginal have had the vote since the 1800’s - there was an aboriginal on Sky a few months back showing his great grandparents on the voting rolls They were amongst the first women in the world to get the vote. People are trying yet again to revise history.
You said it Paul. Lets just call it Fellowship Day much the same as US Thanksgiving.
You can go to any Australia Day celebration and the amount of people there from overseas are obviously enjoying the fellowship along with those born here knowing their good luck in living in this land called Australia.