We should celebrate Australia Day. By various definitions this has been one of the most successful nations in the world. During the past two centuries our nation has had far more successes than failures, though the failures can’t be overlooked: they offer lessons.
Most Australians have pride in the nation, present and past. Today, in contrast, the most vocal opponents of Australia Day offer a gloomy version of our history and many even believe Aboriginal people were, in a variety of ways, better off before 1788 than they are today. Especially in Victoria, they are officially rewriting history and adding a strong racial emphasis. A view is widespread – even though still a minority view – that Australia will lack legitimacy until it makes continuing reparations to Aboriginal people for the land and way of life taken away from them.
It is also argued that our nation will be redeemed only if Aboriginal people are permanently and undemocratically given more political power than other Australians. The nation has recorded a strong No to that argument in the 2023 voice referendum.
Many who dislike or resent Australia Day glamorise Australia’s first people. They see the hunter’s and gatherer’s life as a utopia: they think war was a rarity, that the male elders were praiseworthy without exception, that the old people belonged to a caring society and that most tribes or mini-nations continuously held their own land for 50,000 or more unbroken years. It is fair to suggest that these are all dubious claims.
Ancient Australia had its strong merits as well as its myths. We have to admire facets of its way of life. So long as the population was relatively low and droughts were short-lived, then the people’s supply of food was plentiful. They also inherited or developed a religion that intrigued scholars, who grappled with its mysteries. Its early inhabitants must have carried out marvellous feats, for they gradually explored the whole continent when it was much larger. The huge continent then embraced – before the mighty rising of the seas – what is now the main island of Papua New Guinea and its snow-capped alps as well as the present continent of Australia.
People in what is now PNG, compared with the people in what is now Australia, remained in touch with the outside world. One of their triumphs is little known. About 7000 years ago, in high and fertile terrain, they domesticated sugar cane and an early form of the banana. The outside world was ultimately the gainer, and still is.
Unfortunately, even in some official circles, a layer of make-believe now masks our early history. Australia is mischievously claimed to have been, 80,000 years ago, the world’s first democracy and a haven of peace. Incredibly a vast desert in the interior is now proclaimed to have been, in the long Aboriginal epoch, a fertile and rich agricultural province. These and other theories – now fed to schools by the author of the Dark Emu books – were publicly endorsed in parliament by his friend and admirer Anthony Albanese.
In essence, the invasion by the British was claimed to have destroyed a paradise and compensation must be paid. It is believed, however, by some observers that the Prime Minister would gain prestige if he withdrew his endorsement of this make-believe history of his land. Universities also would gain if they questioned, for the first time, some of the myths embedded in the eloquent Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Australia is usually condemned for its White Australia Policy, in force even before 1901. The policy was sometimes expressed in extreme language that is now embarrassing. Perspective, however, is missing. Today, China and many Asian nations, as is their right, simply refuse to admit foreigners and grant them citizenship.
Likewise in the years when Australians are depicted as racist, tens of thousands gave money to other nations in distress. They helped victims of the Irish famine in the 1840s, Lancashire mill workers impoverished by the American civil war in 1861, and victims of two Indian and two Chinese famines in the period from 1876 to 1901. For one disaster in which millions of Indians died, donations came from sources such as a Carlton-Melbourne football match crowd. Cash and food even came from several prisoners in Pentridge jail.
Other episodes of generosity were displayed by hundreds of thousands of Australians who in churches and Sunday schools gave staggering sums to build churches, schools and hospitals in New Guinea, New Britain, New Ireland, Fiji, Tonga, the Solomons, Vanuatu, New Zealand, Nauru and, sometimes, China and coastal India.
Many Australian missionaries, male and female, also made personal sacrifices to spread, after early failures, their message to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander townships. There, according to recent censuses, can be found a higher percentage of Christians than inhabit a typical suburb in our capital cities. And yet we forget that the more typical Aboriginal households now live in cities and big towns where so many own or are paying off their own homes.
In addition, Australia Day should deliver a powerful secular or economic message. The outside world gained enormously when the long isolation of this land and its Aboriginal people came to an end. Australian sheep of a superior breed eventually were yielding the wool that in most years helped sustain the million Europeans enduring a very cold winter. Similarly, a host of people in poor countries gained the chance to be born and remain alive, such were the fleets of grain ships arriving from Australia. In a favourable year, Australia now grows enough for its own 27 million people and enough for how many times that number inhabiting foreign lands?
It was only two years ago that China, suffering from drought in its drier north, was receiving more wheat and other grains from Australia than from any other nation. Most school students apparently are not taught that Australian foods, minerals, building materials, energy and other products are annually provided in vast quantities to the outside world. In contrast, for thousands of years ancient Australia provided virtually nothing.
There is another reason for celebrating a national day. Tributes can be paid to those who placed the life of their friends and neighbours above their own. While Anzac Day on April 25 honours heroes in past wars, it does not honour a large – even a remarkable – number of Australians who show bravery in time of peace.
In reports of the sensational bushfires in Los Angeles, one item seems to be missing – the brave actions of numerous volunteers who tried to fight the fires. Across the past 200 years a host of Australian volunteers, participating in acts of courage, died or suffered serious injuries while fighting bushfires.
Australia Day can pay tribute to folk heroes. The worst civilian disaster in our history happened in August 1845 when a sailing ship from Liverpool crashed on to a reef off King Island, at the entrance to Bass Strait. More than 400 immigrants, including mothers and newborn babies, were drowned after the Cataraqui crashed on to the reef, the torn sails flapping on a mast. As only one passenger and eight sailors survived, no female voice was left to recall the acts of courage that must have taken place.
We can’t overlook the lads who, at Gundagai in June 1852, rescued people from the surging Murrumbidgee River. Survivors clung to trees, some for a day and longer, and at least 80 people were drowned in this, the deadliest flood so far in our history. In a bark canoe and a rowing boat, two of the local Aboriginal people rescued 69 of their fellow Australians.
Many individualists – generous in spirit – spent their working life in easing hardships of others. Caroline Chisholm, an ardent Catholic, helped thousands of female immigrants in the period from 1838 to 1866. Another of her projects was to erect roadside shelters in which heavily laden people walking to the goldfields in the 1850s could spend the night.
Australia is one of the oldest continuing democracies. That is worth remembering. Admittedly, ancient Athens was a path-finding democracy, but few of its people had the right to participate in vital state decisions and even then they had to be present in person at the place of debate. Naturally, its slaves had no say. In modern history the US was a wonder, emerging as a brave new democracy before the First Fleet reached Sydney. Yet later it still possessed a minority of slave states when most Australian colonies were displaying democratic innovations.
In 1856 South Australia and Victoria were the first places in the world to use the secret ballot on election day. When seven years later Abraham Lincoln, on the battlefield at Gettysburg, made his eloquent affirmation that democracy was “government of the people, by the people, for the people”, he must have known a favourable version of government was already in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Slavery in the US was not abolished until two years after Lincoln’s oration.
Aboriginal people took part in these electoral reforms. Alas, they were deprived initially of certain elementary rights and freedoms, and it is still a grievance, understandably. In the three most populous Australian colonies, however, many Aboriginal men had the right to vote when few white men had that right in Britain.
There is yet another surprise. Most Aboriginal women living in the main districts of what is now South Australia exercised the right to vote in 1896. That was before any women, black or white, had that right in New York, Chicago or London.
The new Commonwealth of Australia, formed in 1901, soon led the world in granting certain political rights to women. Though New Zealand is rightly acclaimed as the first country to grant women the vote, Australia went a step further in the federal election of 1903. It became the first country to grant women the rights to vote and to stand for parliament.
In the world today, democracies are in a minority. The typical member nation of the UN is not a real democracy and shows no signs of becoming one. The Economist Intelligence Unit compiles a democracy index that lists 167 nations and assigns to each a definite place on a ladder of democracies. Only 8 per cent of the world’s population live in true democracies and Australians share that privilege. The public is not aware of that legitimate source of pride.
Melbourne is abandoning its street march this Australia Day. Here is a city, the nation’s first federal capital, spectacularly ignorant of its own history.
Do politicians know how important Australia is in the history of democracy? Our welcome to country was perhaps a useful experiment but can be challenged. Those authoritarian personages, the Indigenous elders who presided during tens of thousands of years, are paraded before us as being virtually free from faults. A ceremony so undemocratic should be rewritten or abandoned.
This could be the first Australia Day since 1917 – the wartime year of the tense conscription debate – when religion is an explosive topic. In recent months, more attacks – by graffiti or explosives or incendiary devices – have been made on Australia’s synagogues and other Jewish possessions than in any previous year. Yet in proportion to population, the Jews have contributed to Australian scholarship, politics, the law and big business more than has any other ethnic group or religion.
Within certain circles a contempt for Jews probably far exceeds the peaks of Catholic-Protestant hostilities during any one decade in the period 1840 to 1970. The burning or bombing of churches – so far as I know – was not an episode in that rivalry.
One lesson of our history, to be remembered on Australia Day, is that social cohesion should normally be prized.
Professor Walter Murdoch was a West Australian who in old age offered us many words of wisdom. On March 7, 1964, he wrote in the afternoon Melbourne Herald: “Quickly the night wind sweeps us away, and the traces of us. We serve the purposes of the day, and if we have served that purpose faithfully, we must be content to be forgotten tomorrow.”
Clearly he understood that a nation should remember those – the low and the high – who learned from its failures as well as those who brought it success. The creation of a nation and its generations of worthwhile people should not be forgotten. That is another major reason in favour of celebrating Australia Day.
Geoffrey Blainey has written 40 books including A Short History of the World and The Story of Australia’s People.
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