Two hundred and fifty guests at the Casey District Probus Clubs’ Australia Day celebration in the Akoonah Centre, Berwick, proudly wave Australian flags. Interest in the celebration was such that nearly 100 people were unable to obtain tickets to the lunch because the ‘house full’ sign went up. (See more photos page 24).AUSTRALIA Day, 26 January each year, is celebrated to commemorate the birth of the Australian nation as we know it.
This was the date in 1788 when England’s Captain Arthur Phillip hoisted the British Flag and took possession of the Australian continent.
I have never been able to understand why this action was not taken by one or another nation even as long as 100 years before the coming of Phillip.
But it didn’t and it was the British Government that saw the place as ideal for a penal colony.
Perhaps that answers my query because many reports are that Australia did not look all that attractive from the sea, so virtually no-one wanted the bother of it.
Nevertheless it would serve well enough as a prison.
Each year we hear cries to change the date we celebrate Australia’s birth because 26 January is a date of invasion and among the most recent voices was Australian of the year 2009 Professor Michael Dodson.
So it was, albeit a fairly passive invasion, and probably at the time no plans existed to push the indigenous inhabitants, the Australian Aborigines, from their lands.
But our ancestors did and did so with relative ease because disease killed many more aboriginals than any number of musket shots.
Massive land clearing decimated their natural food sources and more lives were lost.
Our invading ancestors did not have the intellect to understand that a rich food source was at their fingertips because they often starved or died of thirst in the bush and the hapless Aborigine could not understand and/or capitalise on the European culture forced on them.
Assimilation by either side did not happen and still has a long way to go because these issues prevail.
The Australian Aborigine lived a way of life unable to survive in a world of human beings who as a race had developed a mindset toward technology that brought the then far-off dreamland within a hand’s reach of Europe.
Had it not been Captain Phillip in the name of the British Empire then it would have been another adventurous seafarer in the name of some other nation who hoisted a flag because that is the intrinsic nature of the human beast.
And it goes without saying that the lot of the Aborigine could have been far less fortunate under another invader.
Even the Aboriginal tribes, left to their own resources, fought fierce tribal battles. Australia this year chose a representative of the Aboriginal community in Professor Michael Dodson as Australian of the Year 2009, just 221 years after that first flag was hoisted.
This choice was not the action of a nation out to cast its original inhabitants into oblivion and not the action of a nation trying to atone for past sins because Professor Dodson has a proven record that earned him that honour.
The day represents all things to all Australians and marks an act that by any standards of international thinking was wrong, but an act that happened to nearly every country.
Why are we, those people 10 generations hence held to blame?
Change the date and we deny in our history books what is a fact of our past.
Change the date and we leave it available and open to a myriad of self-interest groups who will take it up as a day of shame and create social mayhem.
This would do nothing for indigenous people except turn the majority against them.
We need this day to be one of national pride, one of reflection, and one of acceptance of our history and of each other.
We need this day to tell ourselves as a nation that we have embraced all nations, and in that have built a workable multi-national society, in what has become a grand nation of people in a great and free country.
All is not well with the lot of our Aboriginal people and it is that for which Australian governments should be found at fault.
Not for this long past act of British soldiers claiming Australia because invasions don’t last for 221 years.
Acts such as giving native ownership to virtually all Australia, on paper, but not the soil, is no more than a publicity stunt that has achieved nothing for the Aborigine in real terms.
We’ve given them native title and no land, we’ve given them grog when they can’t handle it, we’ve given them billions of dollars when money is not part of their culture, and with all that we’ve left them in limbo land in neither one place nor the other.
Aboriginal people are entitled to have education and health because if they don’t take up the way of the modern world with all its vagaries they are doomed.
Professor Dodson has proved himself to be a feisty warrior.
Rather than waste effort pressing for a change to our national day, something that will not happen, he needs to use this powerful position to convince his people that they need education and health for their children and to convince the Australian Government that it needs to see they get both, and quickly.
