Rita Panahi: Woke athletes slamming our national holiday just not cricket
I don’t need to be welcomed to my own country, and I don’t think I’m living on stolen land. As a migrant, my right to feel Australian and call this country mine is no less than yours.
Rita Panahi
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It’s only May but already the self-loathing anti-Australia Day sentiment is making headlines, thanks to entitled activist athletes.
Normally we have to wait until early January for the hate to begin, but this week Indigenous cricketer Ash Gardner hit out at Cricket Australia for scheduling a men’s Test match against the West Indies on Australia Day.
“I just don’t understand why this one day of the year – which is a day of mourning, which doesn’t have a very good history of what happened on that day, that there needs to be cricket … Why does there need to be something that represents something that’s quite morbid.”
Morbid? Our national holiday is neither morbid nor a day of mourning nor a day commemorating an “invasion”.
It is a celebration of all we are and all we’ve built in the lucky country.
As for the “history of what happened on that day” it seems Gardner is ignorant of what occurred on January 26, 1788. The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay on January 18, it was on January 26 when they raised the Union Jack flag a little further north at Sydney Cove.
Perhaps CA who plan to use the day-night Test to lecture Australians about how “painful” the day is could instead impart some indisputable facts.
Gardner also warned that Cricket Australia would have difficulty finding someone to conduct a Welcome to Country.
She said: “Welcoming people on to stolen land is probably not appropriate”.
Well, here’s the thing, Ash and Cricket Australia, I don’t need to be welcomed to my own country, and I don’t think I’m living on stolen land.
I don’t think that as a migrant my right to feel Australian and entitled to call this country mine is any less than yours because of my ancestry or your ancestry.
And, guess what, the overwhelming majority of Australians in poll after poll feel precisely the same way.
Despite the persistent vitriol against the day from the bulk of the media, polls from a number of organisations including Roy Morgan, Deakin University and Core Data, show that the great majority of Australians support the national holiday and want it to remain on January 26.
A Roy Morgan poll conducted just five months ago found two in three wanted Australia Day to remain on January 26.
Elite athletes, woke local councils and other organisations should take note.
Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist
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