26. Australia Day

Hi. I am Greg and it should come as no surprise that I want to grumble about Australia Day. I grumbled about Christmas and New Year’s Day, so why wouldn’t I grumble about national Flag-Waving Day?

Public holidays and long weekends are good things, but could we please commemorate something decent, rather than religious celebrations, a horse race, two military invasions and a foreign monarch’s pretend birthday?

Labour day in October is a start, but wouldn’t it be good if we had public holidays to celebrate our unique environment, perhaps a volunteers’ day holiday, or international human rights day, and maybe a multicultural celebration. And is it too much to ask for Australia Day to be on a day that doesn’t require a re-writing of history?

Quite apart from the obvious problem of celebrating the invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal people, the day is not the anniversary of the founding of the Australian state or nation. Australia came into being in 1901, not in 1788 when a failed “tough on crime” policy put a penal colony in one small corner of our continent. And that colony was essentially a military dictatorship, so we are not talking about a great moment of Australian democracy.

It’s tricky though. Most countries’ national days mark an event of liberation from colonial rule (not its imposition), but there is no clear liberation event for Australia. It might be the advent of responsible (though not democratic) government in the 1850s, or of federation which brought about an “Australian” state. But the laws of the British parliament still applied up until 1932, and 7 years later our Prime Minister still appeared to believe that Britain declared war on our behalf. And it was only in the 1980s that the highest court in Australian law was actually an Australian court.

Of course we still have another country’s monarch as our queen, a foreign logo in the corner of our flag, and the future of Holden and Ford workers is determined in overseas Board Rooms. So perhaps we still await a definitive Australia Day. Or maybe in an era of globalisation it is not really that relevant. Or possibly nationalism was a bad and bloody idea in the first place and we would be better focusing on community rather than country, and people rather than states. Hmmm, there’s a thought.

I am Greg, and I am grumbling.



This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 28 January 2014