General News
20 January, 2025
It's time to talk about the national day
The following is an editorial that appeared in the The Canberra Times on January 16.
The following is an editorial that appeared in the The Canberra Times on January 16.
Peter Dutton's decision to turn the date on which Australia Day is celebrated, and the use of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags at official events, into election issues is the predictable consequence of the Coalition's successful negative campaign against the Voice.
The LNP's populist and divisive "if you don't know, vote no" slogan was based on the premise that if people voted "yes" Indigenous Australians would be granted special rights and privileges the rest of the community could never share.
The opposition campaign failed to acknowledge the devastating impact European occupation has had on the Indigenous population since 1788.
While there is some debate about whether or not the periodic massacres of First Australians by white settlers constituted deliberate genocide, nobody can deny countless numbers were killed by smallpox, influenza, and other diseases the newcomers brought with them.
This moved Geoffrey Blainey to write: "the white sails of the English (on the east coast) were a symbol of a gale which, in the following hundred years, would slowly cross the continent, blowing out the flames of countless campfires, covering with drift sand the grinding stones and fishing nets, silencing the sounds of hundreds of languages, and stripping the ancient Aboriginal names from nearly every valley and headland".
By the time Daisy Bates arrived at Ooldea on the other side of the continent to dwell amongst, study and nurse the first Australians at the beginning of the 20th century the dispossession was almost complete.
"On their own country they (Indigenous Australians) were trespassers," she wrote. "There were no more happy wanderings in the interchange of hospitality.
"Sources of food supply slowly but surely disappeared, and they were sent away to unfamiliar places, compelled to change their mode of life, to clothe themselves in the attire of strangers, to eat foods unfitted for them and to live within walls".
This is not a black-arm band view of history. It is the lived experience of a culture that had survived unmolested for at least 60,000 years.
Mr Dutton, and those who support the narrow view Australia is "one nation, under one flag" and that Australia Day should be celebrated on January 26 because it memorialises the founding of "modern Australia" overlook an obvious fact.
While they see the Western settlement of this continent as a remarkable triumph others have a very different view. Yes, the new arrivals grew fat on the land. But at what cost to those who were already here?
For them the legacy of the last 237 years has been dispossession, inter-generational disadvantage, one of the highest incarceration rates of any people, and health outcomes that are shameful in a first-world nation.
This is why First Nations leaders such as Gomeroi woman and Aboriginal Tent Embassy committee member Gwenda Stanley are outraged by the Coalition's stand.
"Being the day of the invasion, it's an insult to us as Aboriginal people that citizenships can take place on such a day, which is a day of mourning for us," she said.
This, with the greatest respect to the 69 per cent of people who reportedly favour celebrating on January 26 - as will be the case in Canberra - is a highly defensible point of view.
Australia prides itself on being an inclusive society that can accommodate a wide range of perspectives on many different issues.
Surely it is time to have a mature, sympathetic and informed conversation about Australia Day and the best way to celebrate all our citizens.