Australia Day or Invasion Day?
Image: Photo: Australia Day and Flickr.
Opinion by PETER HEHIR
Surely this is a no brainer. Any country that wishes to celebrate a National Day would be seriously remiss in failing to consider celebrating that day on the day when the country was recognised as a nation.
For Australians this was on the 1st January 1901. The day the States Federated and we became a nation. Celebrating any other day as Australia Day raises serious questions.
If we were to celebrate the day that Cook stumbled into the Great South Land and ‘found’ Australia then we would first have to presume that it was lost.
It wasn’t.
Aboriginal or First Nations people knew where it was. They’d lived here for perhaps 80,000 years. Yet today they are still strangers in their own land. Dispossessed, over represented in prisons, marginalised, denied their very existence in the constitution, discriminated against by both overt and covert racism.
Claiming that Cook discovered Australia also has no basis in fact. He was perhaps the first white Englishman to sail up the East Coast in 1770, but the Dutch had ‘discovered’ the Great Southern Land almost a hundred years earlier. William Dampier charted parts of the West Coast in 1699.
The 26th January 1788 is the day that the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour, dropped anchor and rowed ashore at Sydney Cove and claimed Australia for King and Country.
It was Terra Nullius, the empty land.
Except that it wasn’t.
It was peopled by a few hundred thousand people who had divided up the land into that occupied by the various skins. Tribal boundaries were clearly established. Tribal laws were enacted and enforced. Sacred sites were sacred and respected.
It was a well ordered society. But the problem was because they weren’t white, they couldn’t possibly have owned the land. They hadn’t developed it so they obviously didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t appreciate it. It was for their betterment that we took it over, as they were obviously doing nothing with it.
First Nations people don’t believe that they own the land in the generally accepted sense. This is a foreign concept. They are simply custodians. It’s their belief that the land owns them. It is their mother. A concept that the white man couldn’t get his head around then and still struggles with today.
