In 1851, little Thomas Maroney, then two years old, made the perilous sea-journey to Australia, nursed in the arms of his parents, James and Bridget. They were (most likely) fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland. Tipperary offered them only starvation and subjugation, and so they joined thousands of others making their way across the ocean seeking a better life.
Gold was found in Beechworth less than a year later, and the family made its way to the northern Victorian gold-rush precinct, traditionally the home of the Min-jan-buttu people. In (White) Australian imagination, this was the time of the brave settlers building a new nation. Thomas Maroney was my great-great-grandfather.
The convict and settler population they joined was, at that time, over 430,000. In ten short years it would swell to over 1.1 million. Conversely, Indigenous peoples' numbers, estimated at anywhere between 300,000 to over a million before the First Fleet landed, had been dropping precipitously through massacres in the frontier wars, and introduced diseases. For them, European settlement had been a disaster of unheard proportions. Since time immemorial, their ancestors had been custodians of the land, and in the blink of an eye that custodianship was ripped away in the name of a distant British monarch.
But it is the victors who get to write history, and who are guardians of the nations' imaginative mythology: a story that must be constantly remembered and performed to ward off inconvenient facts of history or the challenge of new stories from new immigrants.
So it is that in early January there are the annual stirrings of protest against celebrating — as Australia's official National Day — the anniversary of the British colonialists' landing. Historically, commemoration of the date was rather haphazard, particularly outside New South Wales, until 1994 when it was officially established for all states and territories. In a parallel history, Invasion Day for Indigenous peoples is one of mourning, publicly since 1938 when their leaders gathered in Sydney for an official protest.
But there is no real recognition by our political leaders of the deep wounds that celebrating it as a national party causes for those whose belonging to the land extends back into the mists of ancient time. Instead, they brassily proclaim it to be a day of uniting Australians in our core values, in what can only be described as Orwellian doublespeak.
Thus, as the momentum to recognise the difficulty that 26 January poses to Indigenous peoples and their supporters increases, the guardians of the dominant mythology feel moved to tighten their grip on the received narrative: Australia Day must be celebrated and the moment of British conquest must be honoured.
"Morrison's boo-boo shows it's not really about connecting to Australian history, it's muscle-flexing on behalf of the story that the British brought civilisation to an undiscovered land."
So, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced 6.7 million precious tax dollars would be devoted to 're-enacting' Captain James Cook's circumnavigation of the Australian coastline; except that honour belongs to English explorer Matthew Flinders. Put aside, for a moment, that there are schools, hospitals, and Indigenous community organisations that could make a genuinely positive difference in Australian lives with that money instead of wasting it on a theme-park spectacle, Morrison's boo-boo shows it's not really about connecting to Australian history, it's muscle-flexing on behalf of the story that the British brought civilisation to an undiscovered land.
Morrison and his Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, David Coleman, also plan to force local councils to hold citizenship ceremonies on 26 January and impose a dress-code. This pettifogging requirement seemed to bemuse many, particularly because the ban was supposedly against beachwear. 'I'm a Prime Minister for standards,' Morrison said at first, but later backtracked after howls of protest in support of those quintessential items of Australian dress: thongs and board shorts. Yet it does not take much imagination to predict a day in the near future where 'standards' might be used against another stigmatised group — Muslim women who wear face-veils — as has been the case in Canada and parts of Europe.
What do Indigenous and Muslim Australians have in common? They are the foil against which normative White Australian identity is contrasted. The latest group to join them are African migrants, who have become the subject of a new campaign of fear. It is no surprise then, that we are seeing a troubling resurgence of right-wing, exclusionary nationalism. Images of angry Whites wrapped in Australian flags in front of Melbourne's iconic Luna Park mouth in January, rallying against immigrants, is shocking. But it is not new.
When Thomas Maroney's family arrived in Australia a century-and-a-half ago, they belonged to a similarly stigmatised and demonised minority: the Irish. Back then, the dominant ethnic group — the British settlers — painted the Irish Catholic minority as violent, rowdy drunkards, and potential traitors whose allegiance to a foreigner (the Pope) could not be trusted. But the received Australian mythology evolved over time to allow a place for the Irish in the founding of the nation-state, and because the stories we tell ourselves can change, one day there might be one that recognises and honours all of us. And it won't be celebrated on January 26.
Dr Rachel Woodlock is an expat Australian academic and writer living in Ireland.