‘Change the date’ is a superficial empty gesture

My ancestors — both black and white — faced hardship and discrimination. We need to stop tearing ourselves apart over Australia Day or real issues will never be fixed, writes Jacinta Price.

The history we Australians share is complicated.

In 1832 my great, great, great grandfather was convicted of highway robbery in the Kilkenny assizes. He had “robbed a soldier of his arms”.

He came to the Hunter Valley in NSW as a convict in 1833. We like to think that he was a political prisoner who had defended his people in the Irish “Tithe Wars” of that time.

One of my great, great grandfathers was sent here in 1831 at the age of 17 from Hampshire, after being convicted of housebreaking. He married an Irish girl orphaned by the Potato Famine that killed a million people and forced 1.5 million more to emigrate.

She was brought to Australia in 1849 as part of a scheme to reduce the cost of the poor houses. It was stopped because of prejudice against the Irish in the colonies. They copped it too in those days.

Another of my ancestors was a mounted policeman. But he arrived as a convict.

He and his brother “feloniously killed a sheep” — a capital crime — in Northampton in 1824.

At the same time Aboriginal sheep and cattle killers were being shot here, white ones were being hung in the UK. He got transportation instead.

My Warlpiri grandfather, as a teenager, was only about 30 kilometres from Coniston when the massacres of 1928 began there. He fled for his life, far to the west, to avoid the killers. The worst of them was an Aboriginal tracker who killed children and raped women, according to Warlpiri witnesses.

In 1942 my grandfather was arrested, handcuffed and chained together with others at Kirrirdi, near Yuendumu. He believed they’d been arrested for spearing and eating a couple of goats on Mt Doreen station. They were walked in a line behind a camel around 200 kilometres, from waterhole to waterhole, to Aileron.

A protest against ‘Invasion Day’ in Melbourne held on Australia Day last year. Picture: Jason Edwards

There they were loaded on to army trucks, taken to Alice Springs and locked up at the old police station, given clothes and rations and pressed into labouring for the army for five shillings a week. So it was probably an unofficial labour recruitment program rather than an arrest for goat-spearing.

My son has just come back from Africa.

Through his Mauritian grandmother, one of his ancestors was a slave taken from Mozambique. The slave trade from eastern Africa was run by Muslim Arabs who traded slaves as far as China.

In the west the slave trade was destroyed by the British navy. It was the first empire in history to outlaw, and then destroy, a slave trade at about the same time as my convict ancestors arrived here as enforced, unpaid labourers.

We are a very mixed mob — but 100 per cent Australian.

Some of my ancestors have been here for 60,000 years, some are recently arrived. All have had to adapt to survive. Many of my sons’ ancestors have walked in chains, have been starved and beaten and forced to work for no pay. We could claim victimhood status for all of them but we’d prefer to celebrate being Australian, take the opportunities our country gives us and get on with solving the problems we have now.

Which brings me to Australia Day.

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The Northern Territory’s Lingiari electorate has the highest proportion of indigenous Australians in the country, at just over 40 per cent. It is very rare for the date of Australia Day to be raised by anybody there. As I’ve been saying for years, Aboriginal people have far more serious issues to deal with.

Apryl Day and Meriki Onus from Warriors for Aboriginal Resistance ahead of the upcoming Invasion Day rally this Australia Day. Picture: Aaron Francis

Bill Shorten wants a bet each way. He tells us that, if he is leading the government after the election, he won’t be changing the date of Australia Day. He then goes on to accuse “conservatives” of politicising the issue by bringing it up every year. This is a dog whistle to the extreme Left whose votes he relies on in the southern cities.

When I stated my views on Australia Day publicly last year, I unleashed a backlash. I copped unrepeatably obscene, racist and misogynist abuse and threats of violence, and even death, on social media.

MORE FROM JACINTA PRICE: We can’t change history

This included threats from some in the metropolitan areas of Australia who take taxpayers’ money to run cultural training and “welcome to country celebrations” in their cities.

This hysterical action — against a day that largely brings Australia together — is obscuring the real problems in indigenous Australia.

In the last month there have been five reported suicides involving Aboriginal youth and children across the country.

In the same period, there have been four avoidable deaths impacting on my own family. One of them was a one-year-old baby.

Early mortality, appalling health statistics, and a miserable lack of education and employment. This is the real crisis.

And it will never be dealt with as long as we keep tearing our community apart over superficial issues like the date of Australia Day. We need to come together to find the answers.

Indigenous Australia can’t keep demanding more from taxpayers while at the same time calling them racist and trying to destroy everything they hold dear.

Let’s put our energy into solving problems rather than making pointless symbolic gestures.

Jacinta Price is an Alice Springs councillor.