Vikki Campion: Darwin missed how Australia evolved into something worth celebrating
Australia, as an experiment of sick prison ships filled with the dying, should have been a dead letter but Australia Day is celebrating not how we began, but what we have become, writes Vikki Campion.
National
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This fortnight 189 years ago naturalist Charles Darwin went to Bathurst, lamenting how “rancorously divided into parties” we Australians were “on almost every subject”.
Back then our convict beginnings were regarded by the “better classes” as social sewage. The divide did not end there. It was Protestant versus Catholic, Irish versus English, pastoralist versus Indigenous, emancipist versus free settler versus squatter.
Read diatribes of today’s modern influencers calling on followers to burn down “English” trees and Australian flags and you would think the only people who colonised this scrubby island were shipped in from Downton Abbey in cloche hats and silk gloves. The reality is that early convict settlers, as Lt. Col. David Collins described them in his Account of New South Wales, were “lean and emaciated”, dying on boats as they rowed to shore, “both the living and the dead exhibiting more horrid spectacles than had ever been witnessed in this country”.
The NSW Colony was 70 per cent Protestant and 25 per cent Catholic by 1891. But more than 290 different creeds called her home.
The disparate diaspora, now calling themselves Aussies, in 1891 hailed from Barbados, India, Malta, France, Russia, Siberia, Denmark, Syria, Greece, Arabia, Persia, Siam, China, Zanzibar, Brazil and Peru, each on the hope the colony would be better than where they came from.
Most of us then though were siphoned from the swamp of the UK’s criminal classes, a third of the colony unable to read or write.
Darwin saw the convicts serving free settlers. “How thoroughly odious to every feeling to be waited on by a man who perhaps was flogged from your representation the day before for some trifling misdemeanour,” he wrote.
If Darwin thought we were trouble-plagued then, imagine what he’d think of us now.
Pale women in Bondi are on Instagram mourning Invasion Day and identifying as Indigenous.
Segments of corporate Australia are encouraging employees to work on the Australia Day public holiday to be “culturally sensitive”.
Meanwhile the state government has spent Christmas madly changing regulations to racially divide us on where we can bushwalk or camp and how many fish we can catch.
Our government during Governor Macquarie’s time at least attempted to placate division, not create it.
Instead, the NSW Department of Primary Industries put a new draft regulation on public exhibition while everyone was flat out with Christmas, to “create specific cultural fishing limits which are independent of recreational fishing limits”.
Under these changes, the recreational fisher of Greek or Italian descent is limited to collect, for example, two Murray Crayfish and allowed possession of four, while the Aboriginal Cultural Fisher is entitled to four Murray Crayfish and possession of eight. Different rules for different heritages doing the same thing.
Another sneaky NSW Government move under the blur of holiday festivities was NSW Parks deciding to extend the closure of Mount Warning until December 31, 2025, “for cultural reasons”, with fines threatened to folk from the wrong heritage, or even being in the right tribe but the wrong sex.
Mount Warning, whose closure knocks out about $1 million of business for locals a year, joins Uluru, the Grampians and, as Senator Gerard Rennick called out this week, the Arapiles in Victoria as public land paid for by Australians that Australians are banned from if they ticked the wrong heritage box on the Census.
Of course in Darwin’s day, like Indigenous Australians, the convict class were dehumanised.
Starving first fleet convicts documented: “I was chained seven weeks on my back for being out getting greens and wild herbs.”
Chained for foraging while starving. Now, with preclusions on fishing.
Australia, as an experiment of sick prison ships filled with the dying, should have been a dead letter.
That is why Australia Day is celebrating not how we began, but what we have become.
“Farewell Australia, you are a rising child, and doubtless some day will reign a great Princess in the South: but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect,” Darwin ended his diary.
“I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.”
Darwinian evolution never thought Australia would become what it has.
MINNS STEPS UP WHERE HIS FEDERAL COLLEAGUES FAIL AND FAIL AGAIN
Here is a lesson on how to be leader forever.
When Phebe Furneaux courageously spoke out about her home invasion by juvenile delinquents who bashed her in her Tamworth home last week, Premier Chris Minns did not ignore her story.
Instead, he put his own pen to paper. Enclosed with a two-page official letter addressing her concerns was a handwritten note: “Phebe, I’m truly sorry you had to go through so much pain. These attacks are abhorrent, and I will do all I can to confront these things. Chris.”
In a few strokes, Mr Minns revealed the yawning dissonance between the NSW Labor leadership and the gelatinous federal offering, such as Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen, who refuse to grant those who are being hurt by his solar and wind energy fantasy an audience, a meeting, or even a simple note of acknowledgment.
Or Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, serving up a transparent blancmange of condemnation when racists unleash firebombs on people’s homes.
Politicians in Australia don’t need to fear attacks like that in Sydney’s East yesterday with no reprisal. Cabinet ministers deemed to be at threat, and most especially Prime Ministers, are granted not just 24/7 bodyguards, but the A grade league of personal security.
If such a racially charged attack occurred near any place a PM rested his head, the AFP would not be receiving jelly-spined statements like those Mr Albanese espoused for Jewish targets, where he buck-passed to the states and the courts, the magistrates and some other man in the middle.
What stops him from calling his Labor colleagues, Police Minister Yasmin Catley or Mr Minns himself, to lay the slab of a concrete justice system which protects victims rather than abusers, whether that’s teens attacking vulnerable women or racists attacking Jewish families?
LIFTER
Biden and Trump who managed to find common ground to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza.
LEANER
The clique of corporates virtue signalling against Australia Day while raking in millions from people who’d like to celebrate.
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Originally published as Vikki Campion: Darwin missed how Australia evolved into something worth celebrating
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