News about Australia

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Australia marks national day that stokes patriotism and anger

“Australia Day is Dead!” Indigenous activist Gwenda Stanley chants into the loudspeaker, as a crowd of thousands breaks into applause.

It’s Australia’s national day, but the crowd in central Sydney seethes in anger and cheers in solidarity with Indigenous Australians, many of whom view January 26 as nothing but the anniversary of their colonial dispossession, 236 years ago this Friday.

“Australia is stolen land and we need to be united and firm in our resistance and sustain that resistance until justice is achieved under our terms,” protest organizer Lynda-June Coe, a Wiradjuri woman, told CNN.

The Sydney crowd is diverse, and it’s replicated in Australian cities nationwide.

Each year an increasing number of non-Indigenous Australians find it impossible to celebrate Australia Day, in the knowledge that many of their Indigenous fellow citizens treat it as a day of mourning.

“I think it’s important to show up for the First Nations people in this country,” says Grace, from the crowd on a hot, humid morning in Belmore Park near Sydney’s Central Station.

“I think that there are plenty of other times that you can party if you want to celebrate the lots of good things about this country,” she says.

Elise wears the black, red and yellow of the Aboriginal flag on her earrings, as her friends hold a sign saying said: “Put down ya beer, pick up a banner. This is not a day to celebrate.”

Nearby, Kevin Shaw-Taylor agrees January 26 is “absolutely not” an appropriate day for national celebrations.

On the other side of the city, the Australia Day party was in full swing. The public holiday gives Australians a three-day weekend in the height of summer just a month after Christmas. Millions took full advantage.

Nowhere are the celebrations more colorful than Sydney Harbor. The city’s iconic yellow and green ferries were decked out in Australia Day regalia to take part in the annual race across the very same water that British Royal Navy officer Arthur Phillip crossed in 1788, planting the British flag at Sydney Cove to proclaim the new colony on January 26.

Frank Bongiorno, a history professor at the Australian National University (ANU), says its “pretty creative” to connect that colonial date to the modern state of Australia – which was founded on January 1, 1901.

That’s why many of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and an increasing number of the non-Indigenous or “settler” population, have long dubbed the national holiday “Invasion Day” or “Survival Day” – acknowledging British settlement as first and foremost an act of Indigenous dispossession.

This year, the often toxic argument over the colonial past and continued disadvantage for Indigenous people has taken on a new dimension – it’s the first Australia Day since voters rejected a proposal to acknowledge the nation’s first people in its constitution.

Last October, Australians were asked in a referendum whether the country’s constitution should be amended to recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders through the creation of an Indigenous advisory body – the Voice to Parliament – to advise on matters directly impacting Indigenous people.

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