Joe Hildebrand: Most important thing about history isn’t right or wrong – it is ours to make
Perhaps the most important thing about our history isn’t whether it was right or wrong, it is that it is ours to make, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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They say you could lay all the economists in the world end to end and they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. However, it only takes one marketing guru to instantly reach a cock-up. A case in point is the appendix-bursting Jaguar rebrand.
God only knows who was in the focus groups that led to the carmaker’s sudden embrace of colourful and car-free androgyny, but HR should scan the catering for traces of LSD.
I was reminded of the time I saw a low-cost, generic imitation of Wheelchair Barbie in Kmart and sent a picture of it to my quadriplegic best mate. “No one ever called for greater representation in cheap Chinese knock-offs,” he replied.
Likewise, I am unaware of anyone ever calling for greater representation of the trans community in the design of ultra-expensive, high-performance sports cars. And yet, here we are. Perhaps I am just out of touch with the people.
But at least I am not alone. The ominously named Australian Venue Co also found itself out of touch with the people – at least with Australian people – when a spokeswoman declared it was going to effectively ban Australia Day.
“Australia Day is a day that causes sadness for some members of our community, so we have decided not to specifically celebrate a day that causes hurt for some of our patrons and our team,” the bold statement ran.
Again my naivete is on show, but I would have thought a company calling itself Australian Venue Co cancelling Australia Day in its venues was perhaps not the most Australian message it could be sending to patrons at said venues.
The message appears to be complicated further by the fact Australian Venue Co is, as of last year, technically a Chinese Venue Co. The fact one of its pubs is called The Colonist is just an added bonus.
No doubt Lidia Thorpe will soon be rocking up for a schniddy and a schooner. This kind of pretentious posturing is so vacuous and hypocritical, it actually seems to transcend good and evil. It’s not right, it’s not wrong, it’s just incredibly pointless and dumb.
Like somebody sticking their face in a fairyfloss maker, it doesn’t really harm anybody, it just leaves the person looking stupid and with a mess to clean up. But it does of course steer us once more into our inevitable off-season debate about whether we should celebrate Australia Day at all.
The real villain is all of you: you who are too busy preparing for Christmas or relaxing on your summer holidays. You fail to provide us hardworking journos with enough news to report.
If Australia Day landed on July 1, we’d all be too busy doing our taxes, and if it landed on January 1 – the day Australia actually became Australia – we’d simply be too hungover to care. Once more it has fallen on my shoulders to solve another problem the nation doesn’t actually have.
As it happens, this week marks another moment of great historical significance that we all both forget and remember whenever it becomes convenient. This is the great Eureka Rebellion in Ballarat, an outer Melbourne suburb that still prides itself on being a city.
Many years ago, I wrote that the solution to the similarly summery Australian flag debate was to replace our current handsome standard with the Eureka flag. Frankly, it looks much better and means much more.
Extremists on the left and right know the power of this symbol. It has been co-opted by everyone from radicals from the CFMEU to rioters from Cronulla. They are both wrong, and it is time to make it right.
The Eureka uprising was about freedom from taxation and individual rights, as well as fairness and the rights of the worker against an oppressive state. No other moment of Australian history so unites the left and the right as battlers struggling for a better world.
It is also Australia’s first great multicultural success story. The first man to be tried for the uprising was an African-American called John Joseph, as was your much paler and sadly unrelated correspondent.
Prosecutors thought he would be an easy hang for high treason, but the jury acquitted him in half an hour. He was hailed by thousands and carried around the city – a triumph against racism!
And so Eureka had something for everyone, except the people who needed it most.
For First Australians, the great revolution happened on January 26, 1788. Not as a rebellion, but as a literal revolution, a world-turning event. So maybe instead of pretending it didn’t happen, we should incorporate this change into our history instead of erasing it.
As great Indigenous leaders such as Noel Pearson and Wesley Enoch have suggested, we could mark January 25 as the end of an era and January 26 as a new beginning, with all the danger and hope and uncertainty such moments bring.
Perhaps then we can finally understand the fact the most important thing about our history isn’t whether it was right or wrong. It is that it is ours to make.
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