Australia Day might be controversial but we’re still the lucky country
In the lead up to Australia Day – while acknowledging the controversy – Charles Wooley also warns we should also be wary of those who’re seeking to profit from our division on this issue
Opinion
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On the 23rd of this month, as the Deputy Mayor of the happy shire of Sorell, I will have the honour of inducting new citizens into membership of what I consider the best country in the world.
But will I be allowed to tell them that?
Or in doing so would I stray into the minefield of political correction, social deconstructionism, and the terrible historical apostasy of not being ashamed of my country?
I know I could be in trouble expressing even the most innocuously vague patriotic thoughts. Let’s face it. A hundred words in now and I am already on a hiding to nothing here.
If it isn’t in my stars next week it is certainly written clearly in my council calendar, where you will note that I am to welcome new citizens to our country on the 23rd. That’s three days before Australia Day, the day on which Australians traditionally celebrate their extraordinary good fortune in being here.
Now before I acknowledge the million-year savagery and worldwide violence that accompanied the migration of our chimpanzee-related species as it left Africa to colonise the Earth, let me concentrate on the good stuff; our sheer luck in being here at all on our large patch of this tiny blue planet in a galaxy which no matter how hard we search, seems alarmingly devoid of life.
Let alone intelligent life, if that’s what we are.
The odds are billions to one. You might talk about the Lucky Country, but first you need a lucky planet.
Then we got really lucky. A fleet, tempest tossed across the vast reaches of oceans; six convict transports, three storeships and two vessels of the Royal Navy.
They took eight months to get here. There were about 780 convicts and 550 crew including soldiers and their family members. I thought sailing in the Sydney to Hobart was horrific. Imagine their voyage. Many would never see England again and given what they had been through it’s a fair bet that many wouldn’t want to.
The convicts were a sorry mob. But they too were lucky.
Feckless enough to be caught and convicted before there was even a proper police force in England, but many would achieve wealth and status undreamed of in the Old Dart.
As always in the long haul of human history the newcomers bring misery, suffering and dispossession.
The ancient Britons were massacred by the Romans.
My fierce old iceberg-blue-eyed mother, Ella, was the product of a Viking invasion a thousand years later.
And in turn my mob, the MacGregors, were slaughtered and hunted out of Scotland by the English. Like the Irish they brought their abiding hatred of England to the new world. And so it still goes. New arrivals tend to bring their ancestral hatreds with them.
It isn’t much consolation, but this Australia Day could we seek to find what unites us rather than what divides us?
I’m not a Pollyanna, but the fact is there are not human races, just one human race. We all share 99.9 per cent of the same genetic make-up. What we call ‘racial differences’, colour, eye-shape, hair variations and the like account for only 0.1 per cent of our genetic differences and are the product of Darwinian adaptation to different climates and habitats.
More alarmingly humans and chimpanzees share almost 99 per cent of the same DNA.
The best chimpanzee the planet ever produced, the great David Attenborough once told me: “The great tragedy of the human race is that we are not descended from the noble great apes or the friendly and affable orang-utans but from the chimpanzees whose clannish and violent behaviour is quite frankly, appalling.”
Personally, I also found it worrying to learn that we share more than 1 per cent of our DNA with a carrot. And that we share more than 80 per cent of our DNA with fungus.
This does not necessarily make the human being a “fungi to be with”.
I have seen the best and the worst of the world. I have been to more than 100 countries and I remain confident that Australia, despite those who would divide us, is unequalled in multiracial harmony. That doesn’t mean we have got it right, just that we are a fair bit better than all of the others I have seen.
But as we move into yet another electoral contest we should guard against politicians and interest groups seeking to profit from our division.
This week the opposition spokeswoman for Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, probably didn’t mean to be politically neutral when she advocated a much-needed caution.
In the electoral contest that will now follow, we might wonder which leader would better serve the cohesion Jacinta wished for when she said: “It’s really quite simple – if we are going to truly flourish and be a safe and prosperous people, then we need a prime minister who loves Australia, rather than one who wants to be liked by enough of the right people to keep the top job.”
On reflection, on their big day I won’t burden our new Australian citizens with my unease.
I’ll leave it to them to work out later.
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist
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