Australia Day or Invasion Day?

I don’t really celebrate Australia Day. Some friends came over the night before and watched Clex Smallville and R.O.T.O.R. And during AD/ID I worked on my web page, edited slash, watched more Smallville and watched Obake and RFB play Sims 2. So a quiet @home day.

Of course being one of the two or three specific national pride days (Anzac Day, Remembrance Day) there were things happening around the city:

A list of Brisbane events on ourbrisbane.com - Southbank Parklands and free Kookaburra Queen river cruises are the highlights.

Invasion Day Rally at Roma Street Parklands (notice that this one isn't mentioned on the previous site)

Triple J Hot 100 broadcast (Will Shatner’s Common People came in at 21!)

Australia Day is a little controversial. It’s the day that Sydney Cove was first settled by English Colonialists and their political prisoners. And that one event has left scars all over the landscape, and our culture.

It is a fact that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of indigenous Australians have been slaughtered and uprooted from their culture which has been obscured and denied over the last 200+ years The Indigenous issues in Australia are controversial, and not easily solved.

Colonialism, particularly British colonialism, has run through any nation that had different cultures to theirs and exploited and damaged them. China’s boxer rebellion and the creation of Hong Kong, India’s existence under British rule, South Africa’s Apartheid and the United State of America are all bastard children of the British Invasion of the world. The worst thing about the cultural imperialism is that it still impacts the way that we live here and now.

I’m British and Australian and I was born in South Africa – I’m a result of colonialism: my culture and values are formed because I’ve always lived in cultures with remnant, and hidden, white supremacist values. And yes I will say that I am beginning to see Australia as a white supremacist nation hiding behind the twenty years of Labour tolerance from Whitlam to Hawke to Keating. When we returned to the Liberals, the rotten core of racism and supremacy rose again.

Australia Day is a celebration of our birth as a nation. But it’s a nation founded on an invasion and denial of a culture that existed for well over the 40,000 years legitimised by the state. That in itself is such an amazing thing – a stable culture that lived in a landscape as old and as tough as our country. There was agriculture and land management and art and trade but, because of the political necessity, social Darwinism, Christian guilt complexes (where it’s easier to call another people animals rather than acknowledge the invasion and destruction of a nation), and just plain ignorance, all of this was written out of the history of our nation.

The impact of colonialism is much more complex and invasive than I’ve discussed above, but the essential point is that it does create the culture and country that we live in now. There are undertows of guilt and anger and justification and denial that permeate our interactions with each other and with indigenous Australians. Even those of us who have been here less than 30 years (28 years this Australia Day) carry some of the burden for the way that this nation was formed. We are not all guilty for what happened in our ancestors time, but we are responsible for the way that we shape our future. Accepting the darker emotions will allow us to move forward to build a country that finds common ground. Acknowledging a problem is the first step in finding a solution.

Australia Day is known by some as Invasion Day.

I don’t really see anything to celebrate. Yet.

For more information on the ideas about colonialism, go to Google and search for Post-Colonialism. Edward Said is on of the BNA’s (Big-Name-Academics).