Don’t change the date of Australia Day, change history instead!

Until recently the Australian Classification Board’s learned elders only protected us simpletons from books and films. Thank god they’re here to solve this new crisis.

 

The January tedium of the tennis and its swarm of absurdly wealthy, self-obsessed, automaton participants is always dispelled by the gaiety (if that word still means what it used to) of Australia Day, with beer and burnt cutlets, beer and blackened sausages, all lubricated with beer.

The 2025 celebration will feel extra-special to me, though, as it marks 30 years since my brand-new citizenship authorised me to perform advanced barbecue manoeuvres while soaking up the beer with more beer in the back yard’s men-only standing section.

Every year I reflect on the modest but happy ceremony, held in a council chamber in Sydney’s Bondi Junction, where I was proud to receive a certificate and a small potted wattle, surrounded by excited family and friends.

None of them were mine, sadly, as barely two years into married life I had already established my endearing habit of failing to check Sally’s availability – or on that famous occasion her presence in NSW – before confirming an important appointment.

It’s the same dull-wittedness that will see me stumbling, hands outstretched, down the Pacific Highway from Chatswood after cataract surgery next month, with no one available to pick me up: Tiresias in everything but foresight.

Having spent my formative years in a mean-spirited kingdom that doesn’t give its subjects time off for an England Day, I treasure the public holiday, although situated as I am on the more sensitive end of the sociopath spectrum I also understand not everyone shares my enthusiasm for jollity on this particular date.

Greater minds than mine (plus a number of senior politicians) have tangled with the problem, but it appears intractable. For those who see January 26 as a hurtful salute to an invasion of the land by British soldiers and their miserable prisoners, no amount of post-facto rationalisation, no lauding of the young nation’s proud achievements, will ease their distress.

Moving the anniversary to Anzac Day might be better, except the Great War was hardly a project of particular relevance to Indigenous people (although research indicates more than 500 of them volunteered and fought at Gallipoli). Federation Day, perhaps? It has the calendrical neatness of January 1, and marks the unification of the continent’s disparate political entities, but again, it pays little mind to the original inhabitants.

The English solution therefore suggested itself – get rid of Australia Day altogether – but we no longer blindly follow the Mother Country, and besides, many of us relish a dedicated day for sausages. And (almost forgot) beer.

My own calculus of offence suggests that if significantly more people are upset by a proposed change than desire it, we should leave things as they are. So I’d concluded a number of our population must resign themselves to an annual day of mournful reflection, until last week in this very newspaper I read of a magical body that might deliver a solution.

It’s called the ACB (no, not the ABC; they’re completely useless) and it boasts the awesome ability to amend the past. Until recently the Australian Classification Board was an assembly of learned elders who protected us simpletons from books and films that might imperil our souls, but after guiding the modern world to perfection they’ve now declared themselves ready to fix their predecessors’ errors.

There’s plenty to purge: Guy Gibson’s dog in The Dambusters, Lolita, Huckleberry Finn’s travelling companion, Shakespeare and various religious texts – and pop a fig leaf on that David nudist in Florence, please, while you’re at it.

But these are trivial targets. Let’s see real ambition from the ACB and have them extinguish true wickedness with the fairy dust of hindsight and judicious editing. Don’t waste your time sanitising Gone with the Wind; far more effective to delete all record of the horrors of slavery. And sorry, History Channel, time to erase those Nazis from our collective memory.

As for Australia Day, no problem: if the Board would kindly cancel the disagreeable chapters of our national story, we can keep it on January 26, to be celebrated ever after as the day nothing happened.