While my nearest Coles supermarket sells kangaroo-shaped ice cube trays or Australian flags made in China to put on your car, yesterday in St. Kilda, Melbourne, a James Cook statue was sawed off at the ankles and left the inscription “The colony will fall”.
For yet another year, Australia Day is for many Indigenous Australians a day of pain, rather than a national celebration: “Maybe you don’t like my answer,” Gamiroi man William Thomas responds on Instagram, “I hate Australia Day.” He woke up late, yesterday he had a shift until three in the morning as security at the Caterpillar, a cocktail club in the center of Sydney with hamburgers for 32 dollars (19.45 euros).
“Everything that comes to mind is that they celebrate a genocide and the stolen generations,” Will adds by phone, remembering that at school they told him that Cook was a “pioneer” and now he considers him a “war criminal.” He doesn’t believe anything will change in the short term, but he recognizes that the level of awareness has increased: “I have a colleague who before me had never interacted with an Aboriginal person, yes? He was celebrating Australia Day, but I told him what it means to me and he understood why it is not a celebration.”
The date has nothing to do with Cook, who claimed Australia for the British crown in 1770, but with Governor Arthur Philip who, in 1788, made the Union Jack in Sydney Cove (now Circular Quay, between the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge ) because there was fresh water there to establish the penal colony. Today Australia is one of three former British dominions that uses the English flag or does not have a treaty, nor celebrate an independence day.
“The day of the creation of the Australian nation is also the day that aliens, the British, take over Australia,” summarizes Timothy Rowse, professor emeritus at Western Sydney University. It has been a national holiday for three decades, although the Commonwealth was created on January 1: New Year’s “is not celebrated in a patriotic way,” says Rowse.
In a 2019 essay, professor and historian Mark McKenna defined the difficulty Australia has in including its indigenous populations “in the vision of the nation.” For Rowse, who lived in Alice Springs, in central Australia, between 1989 and 1996 and has dedicated himself to studying the relationships between non-indigenous Australians and the Aboriginal population, any day that is called Australia Day “will carry with it both narratives: one that celebrates the arrival of the British and another that considers it a catastrophe.”
This Friday, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of the country’s capitals. In Sydney, called by the Blak Caucus, a demonstration went through the center to Victoria Park on Invasion Day and this year it was in solidarity with Palestine.
“We don’t want the rest of Australia to celebrate a date that causes us so much pain,” shouted Paul Silva, Dunghutti Human Rights activist and nephew of David Dungay Junior, asphyxiated by five Long Bay correctional guards who wanted to prevent him from eating a package of cookies because he was diabetic.
In the demonstrations on January 26, words such as justice, investigation, death or custody are repeated, since the problems of colonization are still current. Lawyer Bundjalung Widubul-Wiabul Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, a survivor of Australia’s child custody service, has recalled that they are
Aboriginal families suffer the greatest loss of custody: “I heard from a student in the department that they had been told not to wear open-toed shoes. Do you know why? In case they had to grab a child and run.”
Meanwhile, opposition leader Peter Dutton called for a boycott of fellow major supermarket Woolworths after it decided not to sell any more products for Australia Day. Its managers justified the measure because there is no longer demand, but many political analysts believe that Dutton is calculating to what extent he can strain the discourse, something that already happened during the failed referendum campaign for the Indigenous Voice when Senator Jacinta Nampajimpa Price assured that colonization was good for the aborigines.
“Everyone is waiting to see what the next demands of Aboriginal leaders to the Australian government will be,” Rowse acknowledges. But after the setback to reconciliation that was The Uluru Statement it is unclear what the next step is. “We don’t want a supermarket to follow us, but the Australian government,” rebuked Paul Silva.
