In recent years Australia Day has lost its way. It has been marketed as a day for all Australians, but is held on a date is seen increasingly widely as the beginning of the dispossession and humiliation of the First Australians. As a result, it has lost any capacity to provoke reflection on Australian experience.
This year, however, the day 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 any of us, whether Indigenous or other Australians, will soon resume a predictable life.
In such a situation it may be helpful to look freshly at the coming of the First Fleet commemorated on Australia Day. 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.
Reality v myth
The reality was different. On that day the fleet abandoned the inhospitable and unpromising Botany Bay and arrived at the more promising but still precarious Port Jackson. It 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 took many lives, disrupted their culture and made impossible any resistance to the invaders. For the settlers it was a time of anxiety at the lack of food, the threat to civil order and at the difficulties of adjusting to a strange land. Their survival was at risk.
The reasons for the establishment of the colony also contributed to the anxiety and resultant hostility among those on the First Fleet. The preponderance of convicts as part of the intended penal colony encouraged institutional relationships between prisoners and free people. These relationships were based on fear, inequal power and exclusion. 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 hostility to foreigners.
In-built anxiety
The anxiety built into the foundations of Australia readily found continuing expression in hostility and punitive behaviour towards Indigenous people, refugees, non-European migrants, and to prisoners in the justice system.
When seen from this perspective, Australia Day offers an occasion for recalling the sadness as well as the triumphs of our history. 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 to work, vulnerability to imprisonment, and ability to participate in the decisions that impact on their lives.
Australia Day invites us to set the prisoners free from the chains imposed by anxiety and hostility. We are all among the prisoners.