Australia: a deeper date

It started with four people in a wading pool, but by 10 pm the crowd was taking the windows out. The party was too big, and the old shack was too small. They needed better access because the doorway was overcrowded. The music pumped and young people spilled out onto the popular beachfront street. We were celebrating Australia day.

For four years in the late 2000s I held these Australia day parties at the two-room shack I lived in, nestled on the side of a hill and just up from the country town beach. The Australian flag was flying and so were the empty bottles and plastic cups. By the next morning the side of the hill resembled a landfill. We were the bane of the township. And in a way we were just creating a single day diorama of colonial Australia – whitewashed, ignorant, loud, obnoxious and entitled, and perhaps most telling, disrespectful to country and community.

My perspective has changed a lot since my early twenties. I’ve started paying attention to many emotional and social aspects of life that were non-existent to me back when I was ‘sleep-walking’. I see the white supremacy and the capitalist priorities of this nation and its voters. I see my privilege as a descendent of some of the first white “settlers” (i.e., land-grabbers) in South Australia, on Kaurna, Permangk, and Barngarla country.

Australia day now carries a morose feeling for me. But it’s not just Australia day, it’s year-round. And in the years since I stopped celebrating “Australia” the discomfort and anger at seeing the public and official denial of what are by now well-known truths about our history grows.

When I see white people flying the Australian flag I feel shame at what it represents. But when I see migrant families at the beach on the 26th of January, draped in Australia t-shirts and national flag towels, I can understand that. Many families have come to these shores to join us in the opportunities and economic and political peace that we enjoy. However, that safe haven and those opportunities are carried on Black backs by the taking of Black lives and land. The systemic racism is still strong, and colonisation is ongoing. The safety and opportunity exist because they have been stolen.

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Changing the date of Australia day has been touted for the last few years as a solution for the very obvious problem of celebrating genocide, dispossession, stolen children, and systemic racism. The celebrations fly firmly and, disgustingly, proudly in the face of the First-Nations people that mourn this day as the beginning of the colonial terror that is ongoing today. And for a while, I was in support of this move. But now I’m not so sure that it’s enough. I think we need a new date for Australia day, as the Day of Mourning deserves to stand alone, but we need that new date to represent something new as well.

All that the changing of the date of Australia day will achieve is not having grotesque celebrations of genocidal invasions on a day that should just be the Day of Mourning. A day that should be on par with ANZAC day (why ANZAC day doesn’t commemorate the battles and massacres on our own shores is for another day). But when we have a new date, we will still be celebrating, with full ignorance of the truth, a country transformed by invaders. A new date will not bring a treaty, land rights, economic independence, sovereignty, and racial equity.

So, don’t just change the date, change the meaning of what it is to be Australia and to be Australian. And that’s an entirely deeper task, one that requires spiritual healing and reform over simple political lip service.

Currently, I can’t help but feel that Australia acts with grandiose narcissism. We think we’re so wonderful, that we do no wrong and never have. And perhaps this is because our political and capitalist systems favour individuals that also carry grandiose traits, individuals that become our leaders. But having these traits doesn’t make us irredeemable. Our journey to our better selves begins with that chilling look in the mirror and the development of self-awareness to humbly call ourselves out when we slip back into bad, conditioned behaviours. We can do this, and we must do this, lest our grandiosity becomes pathological.

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I think we can celebrate Australia in the same way that we can find happiness on our personal journeys through life. Because that starts with acknowledging the truth about ourselves and working with that. No more denial, no more ideology. Just a hard road to truth and healing.

I think we can have a day where we are unified in mourning the losses of the First Nations people, where we name the existing issues and publicly commit to the work to be done, and then celebrate the achievements towards equity and truth that have occurred over the past year. We can’t change the past, but we can work with it. When Australia day is a celebration of an honest and active reconciliation, rather than genocide and colonial terror, then we can earnestly celebrate this country.

I think it will be a long time before I celebrate Australia again. In my view, our treatment of our own people, our First Nations people, and our national stance on refugees, climate, natural resources, political corruption and many other things leaves us as a disgrace. There are many truths that need to be told and there is so much resistance from the top that permeates throughout our society. We are divided. While the Australian flag continues to be flown in defiance of this nations truth it will remain a racist totem and Australia day, whatever the date, will be a racist day if there is no truth and no effort.