Don’t want to celebrate Australia Day? Here’s something you can do instead

Here’s a question: how do you mark Australia Day if you don’t want to celebrate it? Is there a way to acknowledge that the day is taking place, and maybe even do something that connects you with Australia and all that’s good about it, even on a date associated with much that’s not?

A lot of us have become increasingly uncomfortable with Australia Day in the past decade or so. I don’t know of any other country that celebrates itself on the date colonising powers arrived and began the genocide of the local Indigenous population. I’m sure it seems a bit off, to say the least, to people overseas when they discover that.

Exploring the mangroves of Tropical North Queensland with Juan Walker.Credit: Tourism and Events Queensland

But anyway, I won’t spend too much time ploughing into the varied reasons Australia Day – held on the date Captain Arthur Phillip raised the Union Jack in Sydney Cove and declared sovereignty over half of a land deemed “terra nullius”, or “nobody’s land” – is becoming less a unified national celebration and more a point of disagreement and discomfort.

Let’s talk about what you can do on Friday instead of a traditional celebration.

For me, the answer is very simple: book and pay for an Indigenous tourism experience. That’s it. Jump online, click a few buttons, and book a tour or a day out or just a walk through your own city, something that could take place tomorrow, in a month or in a year’s time – it doesn’t matter.

There are multiple reasons I think this is a good idea. The first is that, regardless of your point of view of Australia Day, this is just a great travel experience to commit to. Some of the most enjoyable days out I’ve had as a tourist in this country have been with the likes of Darren Capewell in Western Australia, Juan Walker in Port Douglas, and Aunty Margret Campbell in Sydney.

Aunty Margret Campbell offers cultural and history tours around The Rocks in Sydney.Credit: Steven Siewert

These are tourism professionals at the top of their game, guides who share their love and knowledge of country in a way that’s immediately understandable and enjoyable. Those three are just the beginning, too – check out any state tourism board’s website, or the likes of Discover Aboriginal Experiences, and you will find a wealth of ideas to create a tourism experience that’s just really, really enjoyable.

Go on a 4WD tour, stare at the stars, go fishing, walk around the city, spear mudcrabs in the mangroves, explore caves, go birdwatching, learn about art, go snorkelling, listen to stories, go boating, paddle a kayak, swim in a waterhole, sit around a fire and watch the sunset and listen to the land. Truly great experiences.

The next, and probably most obvious reason, is that Friday is a good day to consider your place in Australia, and how best you can connect with this country in a way that recognises its existence a little further back than 1788, when a bloke in a uniform planted a flag.

Increasingly, Australia Day for me is a reminder that I don’t know enough about Australia and the knowledge and lore held within it. And I definitely don’t know enough about the experiences of Australia’s first inhabitants, in both a historical and contemporary context.

So what better way to address that than with an Indigenous tourism experience? So many non-Indigenous Australians just don’t have regular contact with First Nations communities, which is understandable, but it’s also something you can easily fix.

The recent referendum in Australia for the Voice to Parliament also showed, to me at least, that there’s a critical gap in understanding in this country between non-Indigenous citizens and the traditional owners of the land, a fear likely driven by a lack of face-to-face experience.

So go and meet someone. Listen to people like Darren and Juan and Aunty Margret. Get their perspective. Tap into their knowledge. Learn more about what it means to be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in Australia. Hear about the world, and more importantly about Australia, from someone else’s point of view.

There’s a final reason to use Friday to book an experience, too: pay the rent. Pass on some of your money. You don’t have to feel personal guilt, or take on any blame. All you have to do is recognise that there’s a massive imbalance in Australia due in large part to the seizure of this land back in 1788, and do a small amount to redress it.

Every Australia Day I make a donation to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, which is a great cause and a decent way, I think, to pay the rent. But you could just as easily support a business and pay the rent to Indigenous Australia on Friday by booking a tourism experience.

Everybody wins here. The provider of that experience wins, because you’re supporting their business. Australia wins, because there’s another small connection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens, a tiny increase in understanding and hopefully goodwill.

And you win, too, because you’re in for a great time.

So make the commitment this Friday. Jump online, research your local area, or an area of Australia you’re planning to travel to this year, and book an Indigenous tourism experience. That’s something we can all celebrate.