Is Australia Day the only thing on the calendar past its use-by date

A conversation five years ago with my super-patriotic mother-in-law brought home the gradual decline of Australia Day, which now appears to be gathering pace.

To celebrate the 1988 bicentenary, she had hosted a colonial-themed costume party whose guests included her then-neighbour, John Howard, who came dressed dandily in 18th-century garb. For years, we had watched the annual ferry races and seen the military helicopter drag the Australian Blue Ensign through the sky from the balcony of her apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour.

IllustrationCredit: Simon Letch

But when, in a phone call from New York – our home at the time – we asked what were her plans for that year’s January 26 commemorations, this woman who proudly described herself as a true-blue, dinky-di Aussie replied with a voice of indignation: “I don’t celebrate Australia Day!”

Every year we seem to be edging closer towards a post-Australia-Day Australia. More employers – including corporate behemoths such as Telstra, BHP and Woolworths – are giving staff the option of working and taking the public holiday on a different day.

A greater number of progressive-minded Australians also seem to be coupling their support for the Voice referendum with a rejection of what they have come to regard as “Invasion” or “Survival” Day. Both, after all, are flip-sides of the same reconciliatory coin.

To my English eyes, choosing January 26 as Australia Day has not only seemed hard-hearted but bizarre, for the simple reason it marks the moment of British colonisation when the Union flag was first hoisted over Sydney Cove. This should be a problematic anniversary for post-colonial Britain, still more so for modern, multicultural Australia. Even in 1935, when all the states first decided to celebrate Australia Day, it should already have been regarded as an historical anachronism in a fledging federation looking to assert itself on its own terms.

Washed up? Australia day, in its current form, will never unite the country as it should.Credit:Virginia Star

Coming to live in Sydney for the first time more than a decade ago after being posted for a number of years in Delhi made this public holiday even more incongruous. In India, January 26 is Constitution Day, the anniversary of when the country’s foundational charter came into effect, reaffirming its independence from the British Raj.

Axiomatically, any national day that alienates, offends and traumatises a significant portion of a country’s population is not a national day. That January 26, and its murderous and often genocidal colonial aftermath, continues to cause so much anguish to the descendants of the original custodians of the land is reason alone to banish it. No amount of citizenship ceremonies, honours, aerobatic displays, pyrotechnics or government advertising campaigns imploring Australians to have fun will alter the fact that Australia Day, on its present date, in its present form, will never bring together the entire country.

The decline of Australia Day comes at a time when other staples of the national calendar may also be running up against their sell-by date. The Melbourne Cup – largely because of animal welfare concerns over horse fatalities – is no longer a race that stops the nation. Celebrating the birth of the monarch with a public holiday – something that does not even happen in my homeland – will seem especially anomalous this year, as we mark the King’s birthday rather than the Queen’s. Small wonder that Anzac Day, the commemoration of modern Australia’s bloody baptismal moment, is emerging as the de facto national day.

Day in, day out: The Captain Cook statue in St Kilda was vandalised with pink paint in 2018 amid growing discomfort over Australia’s colonial past.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

In searching for alternative dates for Australia Day, in identifying other possible events to commemorate, the obvious point of reference is the past. January 1, or Federation Day, is sometimes cited – although given that the first legislative priority of the new Commonwealth was to codify white Australia policies that would tap into the same baleful history. Marking February 13, the date that Kevin Rudd delivered the national apology to First Nations peoples, would be a better option. Rather than celebrate the monarch’s birthday midway through the year, Australia could mark the anniversary of the Mabo decision on June 3 with a public holiday.

Yet rather than foraging through history, maybe the onus should be on the future, and the need to create new red letter days. For instance, if ever Australia decides to dispense with the services of King Charles or his heirs, a “Republic Day” seems like a natural replacement for the present regal public holiday. But surely the more pressing need is to produce a new watershed moment, and to press for a new era in national life, in which true reconciliation becomes a reality.

In this respect, January 26 serves more as a national mirror than a national holiday. It reflects the historic breach in Australian society. It shows us the wound. The ABC journalist Stan Grant, as so often is the case, summoned the apposite words when he observed: “For now, 26 January is all that we are. It is all that we are not. Australia lives in that tension.”

To its credit, the ACT already marks Reconciliation Day, which recognises the anniversary of the 1967 referendum, but that was only an early milestone in a journey that is far from complete. Creating an Indigenous Voice to parliament would take the country further down that same path.

The search, then, is not so much for a date to commemorate. Rather we should think of it more as a quest: to create a genuinely inclusive nation with a genuinely inclusive national day.

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