Who Cares When Australia Day Is?

Each January Australia goes through a mild existential crisis. The country’s national day – Australia Day – is on January 26, but a significant percentage of the population believe it is an inappropriate day to commemorate. The day is often marked by protests. The month leading up to the national day is dominated by a now heavily entrenched culture war over the event. One’s opinion on Australia Day is now a significant marker of political allegiance.

Australia’s national day recognizes the day in 1788 when a fleet of 11 British ships arrived in what is now Sydney Harbor and raised the Union Jack, claiming the land for Great Britain. Australia’s national day therefore marks the date of European settlement on the continent, yet it would be another 113 years before the modern state of Australia was actually created on January 1, 1901.

Australia Day therefore creates two problems. The first is historical inaccuracy. The second is that it celebrates what was the start of an often brutal form of colonization of the lands of Indigenous Australians – a period marked not only by displacement and subjugation, but active attempts to destroy their culture through barbarous acts like child removal. It is no surprise that Indigenous Australians refer to the day as “Invasion Day” and a great many non-Indigenous Australians sympathize with this perspective.

Of course, opposition to Australia Day inspired a counter-movement that dug its heels in. Conservative commentators huff and puff about unpatriotic and ungrateful radicals who wish to overthrow everything that makes the country great. This only has the effect of entrenching opposition to the day further. Both perspectives feed off the other’s outrage.

As this outrage festers throughout January, those who advocate finding a solution to the problem come to another impasse. The suggestion to mark Australia’s national day on the day that Australia actually became a country is met with a different cultural problem – Australia’s enthusiastic public holiday culture.

The argument frequently made against moving Australia Day to January 1 is that New Year’s Day is already a public holiday. This is a very Australian response. To Australians the commemoration of an event is irrelevant when it comes to public holidays; what is important is a day off. And if shifting Australia Day to the day that Australia actually became a modern state means one less day off, then Australians aren’t very keen to do it.

The federal government could easily make up a new public holiday elsewhere in the year to compensate, of course. Australian governments are very good at making up flimsy public holidays. In Victoria there is a public holiday for a horse race and another for the day before a football game (in order for the public to mentally prepare). Australians aren’t shy when it comes to finding weak excuses not to go to work.

The other reason why the day is difficult to change is that once something becomes embedded within a country, it is very difficult to dislodge it. Part of the reason why January 26 was chosen as the national day (initially in 1935) was because nationalism is always trying to reach further back into the past to give itself greater legitimacy in the present. In the 1930s, the young country would have seen its actual birthdate as weak. The political class went looking for a date that had – in their minds – a bit more gravitas.

Yet when seeking to understand the competing visions for a national day, it's worth considering what the options of either January 26 or January 1 actually represent. The settlement of Australia was a British expedition, one that had a finite timeframe as it came to be replaced by a modern nation-state. By contrast, what the federation of the various British colonies began was an evolving project, a new nation that would reshape itself significantly and continue to do so into the future.

National days are at their core meant to reflect a set of ideas, rather than simply acknowledge a historical event. Although the Australian state created in 1901 was brutal toward Indigenous Australians for many decades, it also housed a set of ideas that allowed the country to evolve past this brutality; to understand its past wrongs and seek efforts to remedy them. This again, may not be perfect, but it exists far more in the spirit of January 1, 1901 than it does January 26, 1788.