Australia day, yet again

Australia today marks its national day, also knows as Invasion Day, commemorating the landing of a party of British colonists 237 years ago at the site of what was to become the city of Sydney. The fact that some people had the celebration yesterday – which was the actual anniversary, but a Sunday – is part of the problem.

Back in the 1980s, jingoistic pundits and politicians led a crusade to abolish the traditional Australia Day long weekend and fix the public holiday on 26 January. Later a holiday was conceded if the 26th falls on a weekend, but otherwise it remains fixed: two years ago, for example, the holiday was on a Thursday. And many people are still willing to assert that yesterday was “really” Australia Day.

Although the nationalists therefore succeeded in destroying the old end-of-summer-long-weekend meaning of Australia Day, they failed to put anything coherent in its place. No-one much wants to celebrate the founding of a penal colony in Sydney, and as I pointed out several years back, focusing on the actual history just opened the door wider for the argument that such a celebration was an affront to the Indigenous people who were dispossessed.

Many of us would like a holiday that allowed us to express a sense of unity as a nation, but that’s a function that neither today nor yesterday can serve. Seven years ago I posted a short imaginary dialogue on Facebook:

“This day symbolises national unity”
“No it doesn’t!”
“Yes it does!”
“No it doesn’t!”
Notice the problem here?

Yet some continue to claim that dissent over Australia Day can be just wished away. The cognitive dissonance is especially acute for Australia’s Trumpists, who have to believe that immigrants coming here peacefully to work and to deal freely with other Australians by mutual consent constitute an “invasion”, but colonists accompanied by soldiers who slaughter the original inhabitants and take their land do not.

But after a few decades of the search for meaning, the more nationalistic proponents of Australia Day at least seem to have found a cause. In a previous foray on the subject (in 2010) I said it seemed “that if you took away the celebrity angst, there would be nothing left of the day at all.” Now, though, there is: Peter Dutton and his supporters have found a point to Australia Day. The point is to be divisive.

The nationalists now don’t give us any celebration of Australian culture, or disquisitions on the historical importance of 1788. (Except for Sussan Ley, for whom the Aboriginal people were as non-existent as the Martians.) What they give us is attacks on the dissenters: those who dispute the unifying effect of Australia Day, even if they are just stating the obvious, must be hunted down and silenced.

This war on dissent, or on historical truth, has become the new patriotic standard for Australians to rally around. Just as John Howard almost thirty years ago went to an election on the slogan “For all of us” – offering a clear if coded view that his conception of the country did not include “them” – so now we are being told that the essence of national unity is to pick out certain people to whom it does not apply, whose rights are not to be respected and whose concerns are not to be heard.

And as the Liberal Party descends deeper into Trumpism, the claims of truth are being pushed further and further to the margin.