Australia Day?
Not the convicts, shackled and "transported" for life imprisonment nor the marines or sailors, press-ganged into a long and brutal service, nor the government officials tasked with a near impossible undertaking in the harshest and most distant of locations, nor the aboriginal onlookers, who little understood the perils these incomprehensible and fatally underestimated strangers brought.
None among the "invaders" wanted to be here. Strange invaders!
Yet invasion it was. Unasked for. Deadly. Beset, despite the combined wisdoms of the Enlightment and the Dreamtime, with a total failure on both sides to deal with the reality that now faced them.
I don't feel comfortable with either "Australia Day" or "Invasion Day". Neither captures the reality of the other. Four years after 1788 my own maternal forebears arrived in chains. I am fifth generation Australian. My great-great-great-grandfather was sentenced to death in England for stealing a sheep. His sentence was commuted to transportation for life to the colonies. He would never see his homeland again. His wife was also a convict from Ireland, sentenced for life to a strange and hostile land far from her family homeland. "Invasion Day" does not give justice to their real pain and suffering - neither in England and Ireland nor here. They were our first refugees - shackled in our first detention centres. Good to see ya keeping up a fine old Aussie tradition Mr Howard.
Years later in the 1870's my paternal forebears came out from Sweden and again from Ireland. Refugees again, this time from bankruptcy; personal on the one hand and political on the other. None of them came willingly, all of them came hoping against hope - for something better in this harshly beautiful but alien land.
Now it is alien no longer - for no one. Except those our "liberal" government keep incarcerated behind razor wire or ship offshore to Nauru. Somethings never change.
So shall we call it Convicts Day or Settlers Day or Assisted Passage Day or Boat People Day or Invasion Day or Stolen Generation Day (and which stolen generation?) ?
I would call it Australia Dreaming Day. For the aboriginal concept of the Dreaming (or Dreamtime) has entered firmly into our everyday lexicon and our popular imagination. That would give some recognition to the primacy or the indigenous experience and also to the concept of combined modern nationhood and also to the collective Dreaming of all who have come here hoping against hope for a new and better life - millenia ago across now sunken land bridges or just yesterday on a rusting fishing boat.
In any case, it is an indictment of this nation that on this so-called Australia day 2005, widespread and meaningful reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians remains unachieved and specifically unsanctioned by this federal government. It is also an indictment of this nation that hundreds of children, women and men are detained without trial or charge behind razor wire in detention centres or "transported" to Nauru for no other reason than that this government refuses to treat refugees compassionately and humanely. It is also an indictment against this nation that gay, lesbian and bisexual people who comprise some ten percent of the population should be specifically legislated by this federal government into second class citiizenship. And it is an indictment of this nation that powerful and vocal elements in this society, most notably the so-called Christian Right (whom I declare neither Christian nor right) should seek to erode those civil liberties and those cornerstones of Austrailan egalitarianism and common social justice which have been so hard-won over the last thirty years.
Australia, you have not yet earned your day.