Ashamed of Australia Day? Then don’t take the extra day off

Australia Day has been cheapened to an extra day off for those guilt-tripped into an erroneous view of what the day represents, writes Vikki Campion.

Participants wearing Australian and Aboriginal flags are seen aboard the ferry Emerald 6 during the annual Australia Day Ferrython on Sydney Harbour in 2018. Picture: AAP Image

If you are ashamed of Australia Day, don’t take a day in lieu to reflect the holiday you don’t believe in.

Federal Labor has joined academia and enlightened corporates to tell bureaucrats they can opt to “work” Australia Day if the occasion triggers them, and claim a day in lieu when airfares are on sale.

While Albo claims it’s “fine to have some flexibility”, Australia Day has now been cheapened to an extra day off for academics, corporates and bureaucrats, guilt-tripped into a mythical misnomer of what the day represents, righteous about an erroneous view completely out of historical context.

We should acknowledge a terrible, suppressed history, but should not commit the counter-crime of forgetting the truth of the man behind it, whose remarkable tenacity birthed a free nation.

Thursday is not, as some activists will tell you, the day when Captain Cook invaded Botany Bay, but the anniversary of Governor Arthur Phillip’s landing, who, enlightened beyond his contemporaries, actively sought Indigenous advisers, trade and enforced law for convicts and Indigenous people to live harmoniously.

Governor Arthur Phillip.

Australia Day is not, as some activists claim, a day that has been only celebrated since 1994 but has been marked every year since Phillip arrived with convicts and a garrison to guard them, woefully under-resourced.

As far back as 1818, government labourers were given a day off and “one pound of fresh meat” “as a “just tribute to the memory of that highly respected and meritorious officer”.

For an “invader,” Phillip chose Indigenous confidantes to translate and dine with, named land after them — including Manly and Bennelong — and even as the slave trade boomed globally, ensured the local population here did not meet the same fate.

When a man speared him through the shoulder at Manly, his order was: “No reprisals; it was due to misunderstanding”.

He was dismayed when his convict entourage at Parramatta were “so unthinking, or so depraved, as wantonly to destroy a canoe belonging to a fine young man”, noting it ended any chance of commerce between them.

He hung his countrymen for the crime — which seems counterintuitive if he was an invader. Phillip believed the Indigenous to be British citizens protected by law — in stark contrast to colonists enslaving native populations across the rest of the world.

The Australian national and Aboriginal flags fly atop Sydney; s Harbour Bridge. Picture: AAP Image

Most surprising is that the colony survived famine in such dire straits that convicts were hung from trees for stealing when the alternative was starving.

As the rhetoric builds each Australia Day, we risk forgetting why we have it at all.

As far back as 1818, it was to celebrate a man who navigated uncharted seas with a fleet of prison ships of poor convicts into an unfamiliar land, afforded little help from Britain to build a penal colony that has evolved into the free nation we have today.

He built houses and roads, raised crops and stock, all with unskilled convict labour who didn’t know how to farm or want to be here, and soldiers who endlessly complained about the temperature (42C in the shade), sun, mosquitoes and lack of food, fought with each other and allowed convicts to abscond.

We don’t execute hungry flour thieves as we did in 1798 any more, but judging Phillip’s executions then with the eyes of today would be like judging Indigenous men documented in the same period for killing their wives with blunt force trauma, treating them as possessions, not people, under the tribal conditions of the same time.

It would be an outrage to say that their descendants today are in line with the culture of then. So why do that to Governor Phillip and the unfortunate souls on the First Fleet?

‘JUDGE’ IN CONTEXT

Any examination must be done in context, not in a naive view of reading about then and judging it as if it is now.

It can only be compared to alternatives at the same point. South East Asia under the French, Congo under the Belgians, Indonesia under the Dutch, South America under the Spanish and Portuguese, serfdom in Russia, or slaves in the United States.

In the Congo, they were cutting off people’s hands, forcing boys to rape their sisters, and enlisting an entire nation in a slave rubber economy, razing their villages if they did not comply.

If you want to taint Governor Phillip’s legacy, you suggest the alternatives available in 1788 were more appropriate.

To run down Australia Day, is to suggest we have nothing to be proud of in the nation that we have created, that has given refugees a home and takes in hundreds of thousands of migrants each year, where 50 per cent of the continent is held by native title or first nation land owners, and where we have a whole government department dedicated to helping them maximise economic development on their land.

Considering Indigenous people in the United States own about 1 per cent of the land they historically occupied, 50 per cent of the country is not a bad outcome for less than three per cent of the Australian population.

Portrait of Captain Patrick Logan

The belief Australia as the ancient locals knew it would have remained in isolation is hopelessly naive.

Our beginning could have been vastly different, incomprehensibly worse: from other nations or the British themselves.

After Phillip, torturous sadomasochists such as Captain Patrick Logan unleashed hell in other penal settlements, forced hard labour on starving, dehydrated chain-locked gangs dragging heavy balls in the burning Queensland sun, their backs lash-stripped of skin.

We cannot be proud of the brutality and executions of petty thieves on jail ships, as we cannot be proud of how colonialists after Phillip treated Indigenous people or how Indigenous men treated their wives and daughters, but we must be proud of where we are today, egalitarian, compassionate and, most of all, free.

If you cheapen Australia Day to an extra day off for the laptop class, you forget Governor Phillip, who raged against the tide of the times of how Indigenous people were treated in every other part of the globe during unrelenting colonisation.

Or you can rewrite history to get a day off when the airfares are cheaper.

Don’t let your triggered freebie get in the way of your hypocrisy.