Bit by bit, Australia Day is starting to look like the national days of other countries. Once upon a time, the anniversary of the arrival of the first British settlers was celebrated in ways that were remarkable solely for not being in any way remarkable. Today, our national day by chance falls on a Monday; until 1994 it was always so. Australia Day was routinely moved to the Monday closest to January 26 so everyone could enjoy a long weekend. Most people would accept it as a day off work, to be spent with family – at a barbecue, perhaps, or at the beach.
How Australian, was the general feeling – a national day where everyone just did nothing.
Far from celebrating our divisions, Australia Day celebrates what has brought, and continues to bring, Australians together. Credit: Simon O'Dwyer
That is changing.
Indigenous Australians, who have understandably different ideas about the meaning of the anniversary, were probably the first to challenge this unthinking tranquillity. Their early protests, at Australia's sesquicentenary in 1938, attracted no widespread attention then, though they are rightly celebrated now.
Half a century later, the declaration of 1988 as a year of mourning gained more attention to a cause and a grievance – indigenous disadvantage – that had too long been neglected, and was only just starting to be seriously addressed. Arguments about whether the Europeans who first arrived in Australia were settlers or invaders can never be conclusive.
Partisan positions on either side can become shrill – but they need not, and should not. What is important is that the Indigenous view of our shared history is fully acknowledged and respected.
The debate is an important part of the long and still incomplete healing from the transformation – at times peaceful, at others traumatic – which began 227 years ago today and created modern Australia. That view, the debates to which it has given rise, and the freedom with which those different viewpoints can be expressed, are part of the way modern Australians understand themselves as a nation.
If Indigenous Australians began the process, other forces have shaped it. The related trend, multiculturalism, has played a substantial part. The last generation to feel strongly the bonds of empire – roughly, the generation which came to adulthood during World War II – is slowly passing into history, and with it the idea that authentic Australian loyalties might be divided exclusively between just two homelands – Australia and Britain.
Post-war immigration means Australians have backgrounds which span the globe. By diffusing the loyalty to a non-Australian homeland from Britain alone to the whole world, multiculturalism has made Australia the nation, and the idea, which is common to all.
Little by little, a national consciousness has grown which has filled out Australia's national day, and released it from the occasionally resentful and peevish attitudes which once characterised the Australian nationalist's relations with Great Britain – attitudes which may survive today in sporting contests but, thank heavens, nowhere else.
Today's citizenship ceremonies across the country reflect the mature confidence of contemporary Australia. Soon, let us hope, there will be further reason for national pride – an Australian republic, in which it will be possible for a citizen of this country to reach the highest of all offices in this country: head of state.
But the pride of which we speak should not extend – today or in the future – to jingoistic displays, aggression or triumphalism, any more than to clamorous complaints. In its calm and benevolence, the spirit of the old Australia day was refreshingly free of flaws of that kind, and that aspect of it is worth preserving.
Australians, whether their forebears came here 40 millennia ago, two centuries ago, or five years ago, all have much to be grateful for.
Far from celebrating our divisions, Australia Day celebrates what has brought, and continues to bring, Australians together. So let us make a modest proposal. Australians are not a demonstrative people, but sometimes we make exceptions.
We stop at 11am on Armistice Day; in RSL clubs, we turn to the flame at 9pm.
On our national day, at midday, let us stop and sing the national anthem.
Australians all, let us rejoice: we have much to celebrate.