Antinuclear

Most people just want a day to celebrate the place that they call home, to be part of a community, and to guide Australia into the future. I am one of these people, so why can’t we celebrate this on a day that includes all Australians? Surely there must be another historically significant date that can be trumped up to include every person in this country. But ignorance is bliss, right?

Australia Day is a time for mourning, not celebration, The Guardian 26 Jan 14 The refusal to celebrate Australia Day is part of an ongoing fight for the recognition of the abuse of Indigenous people’s rights. If we give up on protesting, we might soon no longer remember the past Nakkiah Lui

“………I’m an Aboriginal woman in her 20s , but it’s only four generations back that my family felt the direct consequences of foreigners invading our land. There’s my great-great grandmother, who survived a massacre; my great grandfather, who was forced back to the mission after his father died and wasn’t allowed to own land; my grandfather, who was given “dog tags” dictating he was an “honorary white man” after he returned from being a prisoner of war in World War II; my mother, who was encouraged to not finish high school because she was Aboriginal

This is why, for us, Australia Day is a day of mourning. It is not a day to go over to my friends’ to sit in a blow up pool and get drunk, and it’s definitely not a day to wear red, white and blue while waving a flag with a Union Jack and a Southern Cross on it.

We do not celebrate the coming of the tall ships in Sydney’s harbour. Instead, we mourn the declaration of Australia as terra nullius (empty land) as well as those who have died in massacres, those who were dispossessed of their land and homes, those were denied their humanity, those who were shackled, beaten, sent to prison camps, and made to live in reserves. We mourn those who have died in the resistance……

We mourn whilst the rest of the country celebrates around us.

Protesting against Australia Day is nothing new; it is an ongoing fight for the recognition of what has been happening to us for over 100 years. One of the earliest Aboriginal protest occurred in 1888, when Indigenous people boycotted centenary celebrations. In 1937 William Cooper, a member of the Aboriginal Progressive Association, declared the sesquicentenary a “day of mourning”, and a protest was held at the Australian Hall in Sydney.

This doesn’t stop here. In 1985, the Sydney Morning Herald noted that:

For the official 1938 Australia Day celebrations, the government brought in “tame blacks” from the Menindee reserve. They were taken straight from the train, locked up in a stable at the Redfern police barracks, and guarded by dogs. On 26 January 1938, they were brought out dressed in leaves to be chased along the shore by British soldiers with bayonets and to parade through the street on a float. The next day they were sent back to their tin sheds on the Darling River.

These days we do the re-enactments without the bayonets, and Aboriginal elders give a Welcome to Country. This welcome happens on the very same spot where Indigenous people who encountered the first tall ships yelled “warra warra” (go away). It is the very same spot where Aboriginal people were murdered purely because this land was their home…….

There are still protests every year around the country and at the Tent Embassy in Canberra, but for many Australians, the extent of their knowledge of that would be the saga of Julia Gillard’s missing shoe incident during the 2012 Australia Day protests. Twenty-six years on from the 1988 celebrations, I do wonder: if Aboriginal Australians were to march through Sydney now in the name of survival, would we get the support we were given then? I don’t know if we would get much support, or if our red, black and yellow Aboriginal flags would be welcome amongst the union jacks and south crosses. …..

Most people just want a day to celebrate the place that they call home, to be part of a community, and to guide Australia into the future. I am one of these people, so why can’t we celebrate this on a day that includes all Australians? Surely there must be another historically significant date that can be trumped up to include every person in this country. But ignorance is bliss, right?…..http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/26/australia-day-is-a-time-for-mourning-not-celebration?commentpage=3