This coming Monday 26th January we engage in the annual Australian discussion of whether to celebrate or commemorate?
26th January 1938 marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove. The Aborigines Progressive Association, led by Jack Patten and William Ferguson, held the first Day of Mourning to highlight the continuing mistreatment of First Nations peoples since the invasion of their lands by the British Crown in 1788.
In 1994 the date was fixed across all Australia, that 26th January would be the ‘Australia Day’ public holiday. The practice by some states of holding the holiday on a Friday in late January for a long weekend was dropped.
The celebration of Australia Day as a national holiday was preceded by more than half a century by our First Peoples wish to hold a day of mourning on this same date. If we were only to appeal to the sense of ‘Fair Play’ that I believe Australians do, then we should change this date. Not out of any understanding of our dark colonial history, not out of any racist based cliché, just purely out of the Australian belief in what is right and just.
“The 26th of January, 1938, is not a day of rejoicing for Australia’s Aborigines; it is a day of mourning. This festival of 150 years’ so-called “progress” in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original native inhabitants by the white invaders of this country.”\
References:
1. Poster announcing details of the Day of Mourning, a protest event conducted by Indigenous Australians in 1938.
2. Not a date to celebrate free image from Clothing The Gaps
3. David Kerrigan & Lucinda Flynn, current Nillumbik Reconciliation Group NRG President, meeting at Allwood this week