The great shame of Australia Day

Captain James Cook has fallen. Not on the shore of Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay on Valentine’s Day 1779, but in the Melbourne bohemian bayside suburb of St Kilda. His statue was sawn off at the ankles in the dead of night with an angle grinder; his plinth daubed in a blood-red, anti-colonial slogan.

The culprits haven’t been caught yet. Their act of vandalism happened on the eve of Australia Day, celebrated on 26 January as the anniversary of the day in 1788 when a British penal settlement was established by a motley crew of seamen, marines and convicts, which ultimately became the great city of Sydney and the birthplace of modern Australia.

If polls are right, 26 January is still the day the majority of Australians prefer for celebrating Australia Day. But there is a growing vocal, noisy and militant minority demanding Australia change the date. They argue that the arrival of the British almost 250 years ago marked the start of dispossession – and worse – for the indigenous peoples who had occupied the continent for tens of thousands of years. They like to frame 26 January as ‘invasion day’.

Worse, those people – who include a cross-section of Australia’s activist and political Left – use every publicity and media platform available to them (in the case of Cook’s statue, literally de-platforming him) to strong arm the majority to bear the shame of what they define as Australia’s original sin. Former prime minister John Howard called such unrelentingly dark views of Australia’s national story ‘black armband’ history. He argued this grossly distorts the truth that, while Australia’s colonial past was far from unblemished in its treatment of the country’s prior inhabitants, the overall story is a positive one of national success against the odds. His view of Australia is a place where Aborigines and, post-1788, settlers from Britain and around the world tamed a hostile land to live together in relative peace and harmony under a stable, constitutional democracy.

Most popular

Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

But each year the black armband voices grow louder and shriller. This year, Cricket Australia joined its tennis counterpart in all but ignoring Australia Day, even though a Test match is being played on the day itself. Australia’s Test captain and the holder of sport-mad Australia’s second most important office, Pat Cummins, has joined the Change the Date brigade. ‘Once you start realising 26 January and why it is chosen, Australia Day is meant to be a celebration of everything Australia and our history. [So] we could choose a better date’, Cummins said last week.

But change the date to what? There are no obvious alternative candidates, and the shame merchants have never proposed one.

Meanwhile, major companies such as the supermarket giant Woolworths (no relation to the now-defunct UK namesake) have paraded their public virtue signalling. ‘Woolies’ announced earlier this month they would no longer sell Australia Day merchandise – harmless ephemera – in their stores. ‘There has been a gradual decline in demand for Australia Day merchandise from our stores over recent years,’ a spokesperson asserted, before saying, ‘At the same time there’s been broader discussion about 26 January and what it means to different parts of the community.’

It seems to have been lost on Cummins and corporate virtue signallers like Woolworths that six out of every ten Australians last October voted down the referendum for a separate Aboriginal ‘Voice’ to Australia’s parliament. They now simply want to enjoy Australia Day as a family day that just as much, if not more, marks the end of languid summer holidays Down Under. One suspects that Woolworths, which would have had to place orders with suppliers many months ago, made the decision then and banked on the Voice being adopted overwhelmingly. They, Cummins, and the Change the Date activists have failed to read the mood of the whole of the Australian population – not just the 3 per cent identifying as Aboriginal. They don’t understand the backlash against their comments.

Activists simply don’t get that most Australians prefer to focus on the positives about being Australian. Aussies don’t want to be browbeaten to carry guilt and seek absolution for some of the acts and attitudes of long-ago generations of settlers. Aboriginal Australian senator, Jacinta Nampijimpa Price, spoke for many when, at the height of the Voice campaign last year, she said of British settlement:

[It had] a positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food, everything that my grandfather had when he was going up, when he first [met] white fellas in his adolescence, we now have. Otherwise he would have had to live off the land, provide for his family and all of those measures which Aboriginal Australians, many of us, have the same opportunities as all other Australians in this country and recently have probably one of the greatest systems around the world in terms of a democratic structure in comparison to other countries.

Australia is a strange place these days, more consumed by propagating national shame than being even willing to fostering national pride. But the real shame of Australia Day is that so many of our political, corporate and cultural leaders are deeply complicit in the national guilt industry, seemingly hell-bent on turning what, for many decades, has been a day of great pride for Australians into a day of national self-flagellation.

James Cook, whose original orders directed him to ‘show every kind of civility and regard to the natives’, did everything he could to do just that on his two Australian landings in 1770. That some descendants of those natives, and their activist allies, do everything they can to not just desecrate his statue, but his immortal memory and world-changing achievements, is perhaps the greatest shame of Australia Day 2024.