In recent years, Australia Day has been a holiday without title. It has been marketed as a day for all Australians, but is held on a date is seen increasingly as the beginning of the dispossession and humiliation of the First Australians. As a result it is generally received as an opportunity to laze around undisturbed by serious thoughts about Australia.
This year, however, serious thoughts buzz around like flies. Its beginning marks the second anniversary of the bushfires and of the arrival of Coronavirus in Australia. Over these two years the effects of global warming have become tangible, and we are less convinced by easy assurances that after Coronavirus we shall soon resume a predictable life of shared prosperity.
The uncertainty about the immediate and distant future of Australian society in which Australia Day is celebrated this year affects both people of the First Nations and the descendants of later arrivals. Neither the climate nor the virus discriminates. The virus has spread from cities into communities through Western Australia. We are told, too, that the 50-degree temperatures experienced this year in inland Western Australia will also become a feature of summer in Western Sydney. Such prodigies invite us all to ask what kind of a society we want Australia to be and how we may build it in a time of uncertainty.
In doing that we may profitably look freshly at the coming of the First Fleet. The images painters have left us of the landfall portray powerful and handsomely dressed representatives of a mercantile culture settling easily into a new and sparsely populated land, observed by a few poorly clad and primitive native people. They describe a powerful, resourceful and sure future replacing a poor and ineffectual past.
The events of January 26, 1788, however, tell a different story. On that day the fleet abandoned the inhospitable and unpromising Botany Bay and arrived at the more promising, but still precarious, Port Jackson. The landing introduced a time of anxiety and stress both for the First Australians and the invaders. For the Indigenous people the coming of the fleet was a disaster. Recurring pandemics brought by the newcomers killed up to two thirds of local tribes, disrupted their culture and made impossible any resistance to the invaders. For the settlers it was a time of anxiety, of lack of food, of threat to civil order and of adjustment to a strange land. The First Fleet comprised about 1,000 convicts and 500 soldiers, most of whom lacked skills in farming or building. As a result, crops and flocks failed to flourish. Governor Philip had to send to Indonesia for provisions.
"The Australian experience of the last two years has also put into relief positive qualities of Australian culture on which a better future can be built."
The reasons why the British government sent the first fleet also contributed to the anxiety and resultant hostility among those who arrived on it. The preponderance of convicts in the intended penal colony encouraged institutional relationships based on fear, inequal power and exclusion between prisoners and free people. The newcomers’ claim to the land bred anxiety and resentment between the First Australians and the settlers. Both lived off the same land. The geopolitical goal of the First Fleet to prevent the French and other European powers from establishing a base in the land, too, created anxiety about foreigners. It was strengthened rather than weakened by the cordial encounters with French expeditions.
The anxiety built into the foundations of Australia readily found expression in hostility and punitive behaviour towards Indigenous Australians, prisoners and foreigners. This became characteristic of Australian society and was reflected in attitudes to and treatment of Indigenous peoples, refugees, non-European migrants, and in penal policy.
When the beginnings of Australia are set against this background, Australia Day become an occasion for recalling the sadness as well as the achievements of colonisation. It evokes the demeaning as well as expansive strands of Australian culture. It recognises the loss of the First Australians as they endured despoliation, infection and discrimination, and evokes wonder at their resilience. It also recognises how the initial anxiety and hostility have shaped subsequent institutional and personal relationships between Indigenous and other Australians, and the impact of these on their life expectancy, health, access to education and work, vulnerability to imprisonment and ability to participate in the decisions that impact on their lives.
The Australian experience of the last two years has also put into relief positive qualities of Australian culture on which a better future can be built. They are evident in the small friendships across boundaries of race and religion, the mutual support of people in drought, fire and flood, and the generous service to public life and the building of local communities. We have come to value the sacrifices made by people in accepting restrictions for the common good, and the generosity of nurses and others in the medical system, and in other essential services. These counteract the pull of anxiety and hostility and embody hope for a better Australia. They are the core of a decent Australia Day.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: The Mellish in Sydney Harbour. (Wikimedia Commons)