While Coles supermarkets sell kangaroo-shaped ice packs or Australian flags made in China to put in the car, on Friday in St. In Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne, they sawed off a statue of James Cook by the ankles and left it written: “The colony will fall”.
Another year, Australia Day, which is commemorated on January 26, is for many indigenous Australians a day of sorrow, rather than a national celebration: “Maybe you don’t like my answer – replies Gamiroi William Thomas, or simply Will–. I hate Australia Day.” He’s up late, yesterday he was on duty until three in the morning as security at Caterpillar, a cocktail club in central Sydney that sells hamburgers for $32 (€19.45).
“All I can think of is that they’re celebrating genocide and the stolen generations,” adds Will, who remembers being told at school that Cook was a “pioneer” and now considers him a “war criminal “. He does not believe that anything will change in the short term, but he recognizes that the degree of awareness has increased: “I have a colleague who before me had never interacted with any Aboriginal people. He was celebrating Australia Day, but I explained to him what it means to me and he understood why it’s not a celebration.”
The date has nothing to do with Cook, who claimed Australia for the British crown in 1770, but with Governor Arthur Phillip, who in 1788 raised the Union Jack at 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 that does not celebrate an independence day.
“The day of the creation of the Australian nation is also the day that aliens, the British, take over Australia”, sums up Timothy Rowse, professor emeritus of Western Sydney University. It has been a national holiday for three decades, even though the Commonwealth was created on January 1, a date that “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 between 1989 and 1996 lived in Alice Springs, in central Australia, and who has devoted himself to studying the relations between non-indigenous Australians and the aboriginal population, any day that is called Australia day ” it will bring inside the two narratives: one that celebrates the arrival of the British and another that considers it a catastrophe”.
On Friday, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of major cities across the country. In Sydney, called by Blak Caucus, a demonstration went through the center to Victoria Park in protest against “Invasion Day”. This year the event has shown solidarity with Palestine.
“We don’t want the rest of Australia to celebrate a date that causes us so much pain,” cried Paul Silva, Dunghutti human rights activist and nephew of David Dungay Jr., a young Aboriginal man who was suffocated to death by five prison guards in 2015 from Long Bay.
In the demonstrations of January 26, words such as justice, investigation, death or custody are repeated, because the problems of colonization are still valid. Bundjalung widubul-wiabul lawyer Vanessa Turnbull-Roberts, a survivor of Australia’s child custody service, recalled that it is Aboriginal families who suffer the most from custody losses: “I heard a student in the department say that they had said not to wear open shoes. Do you know why? In case they had to grab a child and run.”
Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Liberal Peter Dutton called for a boycott of supermarket giant Woolworths after the company decided to stop selling products for Australia Day, arguing there was no longer demand. .
“Everyone is waiting to see what will be the next demands of Aboriginal leaders to the Australian Government”, acknowledges Rowse.
“We don’t want a supermarket to follow us, but the Australian Government”, answered Paul Silva.
