A day of mourning, a day to protest invasion or a public holiday: however Australians mark the date, community leaders say it’s time for ‘a lot of listening’
Every year in the lead-up to 26 January, Bundjalung woman Karen Mundine dreads hearing “the same or similar voices yelling at each other”.
For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, it is a day of mourning, marked with pain, sadness, frustration and anger at the continuing damage done by colonisation.
Thirty-one years ago, prime minister Paul Keating declared Australia Day a national public holiday. About two centuries earlier, in 1788, the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove from Botany Bay.
For more than 60,000 years before commander and captain Arthur Phillip planted the union jack on the shore to establish the colony of New South Wales, hundreds of nations of Australia’s first peoples lived across the continent.
Now, 26 January – known by many as Invasion Day or Survival Day – is marked by events including protests, rallies, marches, vigils, workshops, ceremonies, festivals, and concerts.
Many want the day abolished entirely and even more want the date changed. Aboriginal leaders are calling for a calmer and more nuanced public dialogue – more education and more understanding.
Mundine, the chief executive officer of Reconciliation Australia, welcomes the increasing number of reflective events, such as vigils on 25 January, and dawn mourning ceremonies.
“A lot of our research says the more people understand the history of this country and how things happened, not just back in 1788, but how they continue to play out today,” Mundine says. “It makes them understand the concept of reconciliation and spurs them to want a different date.”
But while she welcomes debate around the day she is saddened it is not being had in a more respectful way.
“It results in name calling, or is deliberately divisive … pushing people into divisive positions without listening or understanding,” she says.
Bridget Cama, a Wiradjuri and Pasifika Fijian woman and co-chair of the Uluru Youth Dialogue, is similarly frustrated. “The date itself is a great opportunity to talk about our country and unfinished business, but it gets hijacked by media, politicians, people of influence,” she says.
Cama believes calls for changing the date, or for abolishing it, don’t “get to the root cause of why so many First Nations people feel so much pain”.
“It marks the beginning of invasion and the subsequent injustice that followed, including dispossession, genocide and then the systemic exclusion and discrimination,” she says.
“I don’t think a lot of Australians understand that the widening gap, disproportionate rates of child removal, incarceration, terrible health outcomes, the statistics that affect us, are intimately linked to this historical injustice that stems from that [day].
“It’s not just something that happened in the past, it’s our reality and it shows up in our everyday lives. Whether we change it or abolish it … my question is more: ‘Would these actions or changes address our grievance or the circumstances of our people?’.
“Celebrating Australia Day on the 26th means we’re celebrating an Australia that doesn’t include First Nations people.”
Another Uluru Youth Dialogue co-chair, Allira Davis, thinks abolishing the day is unrealistic, and changing the date might just shift the problem. To move forward, she says Australians need to understand the true history of 26 January.
Deakin University research this time last year found 56% of Australians did not want Australia Day moved, but that support for the event was declining and most people under 35 supported changing the date.
Around the same time, University of Melbourne researchers wrote in The Conversation that “community ignorance and apathy” may have been behind the failure of the voice referendum. The same lack of engagement “could also drive reluctance to change the date of Australia Day,”, they said.
They found Yes referendum voters had better knowledge of colonial history – and the more historical knowledge people had, the more strongly they supported changing the date.
In 1938 – the 150th anniversary of Phillip’s arrival in Sydney Cove – a group of Aboriginal people declared the first “Day of Mourning”. They moved this resolution:
“We, representing the Aborigines of Australia, assembled in conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th anniversary of the whiteman’s seizure of our country, hereby make protest against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years, and we appeal to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status and equality within the community.”
On 26 January in 1972, he Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established, and in 1988, tens of thousands of Australians marched in protest on the bicentennial.
There have been calls for a new national day on dates including 1 January (the day of federation), 3 March (the date of legal independence), 8 May (because “May 8” sounds like “mate”) and 9 May (when the constitution came into effect). There’s 30 July, the first Australia Day, created as a war fundraiser. The campaign for Australia to become a republicalso includes celebrating that day.
“The day has always been contested,” Kate Darian-Smith, a University of Melbourne cultural and social historian says.
Before Keating’s 1994 declaration, she points out, it was initially a NSW-specific date, with other states and territories celebrating different days.
“In the past 10 years or so there’s been more and more discussion on the suitability of the date,” she says. Since the voice referendum was rejected, she notes, there has also been more discussion around treaty and truth telling.
Many councils are opting to have citizenship ceremonies previously held on the 26th on different days (a move opposition leader Peter Dutton has declared he will stop).
And there has been action in the private sector, with major stores including Woolworths taking Australia Day merchandise off shelves (before reinstating it) and other big companies allowing employees to opt to take a different day off.
Another change Darian-Smith has noticed is conservative commentators arguing the day is important for migrants. “Some of it almost pits [migrants] against Indigenous people,” she says.
Reconciliation Victoria, the state’s peak Aboriginal reconciliation body, this week condemned actions “by political figures, local councils, and sporting clubs that undermine the status of First Peoples” – including “downgrading the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, limiting welcome to country ceremonies, and efforts to diminish public awareness of the significance of 26 January for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”.
The body said these moves were “regressive and divisive”.
Prof Andrew Gunstone, co-chair of the board, described such attempts as “at best, misguided and lacking compassion, and at worst, cynical, racist, and exploitative”.
The federal government supports more than 750 community events on 26 January. “More than” 171have “significant Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander elements”, it says
The day’s annual protests continue to evolve, with many incorporating other issues. Rally organisers Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, for example, call for truth, treaty and justice, including climate justice; pro-Palestine protests have been incorporated into many other events. Mundine, however, cautions non-First Nations protesters to be conscious of potentially detracting from the original intent of rallies. “It’s an important time for us,” she says.
Cama says it will take “a lot of listening” and political and community leadership to lead to better understanding of the complex and problematic significance of the day.
“I want to get to a point where we can celebrate our country for what it truly is,” she says.
“That includes us in our diversity and our 60,000-year history. I hope one day that’s possible.”
She points to that 1938 protest, and the resilience and strength shown by the elders.
“We’re still here and we’re not going anywhere,” she says.
