Australia Day

I've never met anyone else who shares this opinion, and people I try to explain it to invariably think I'm a nutter. But here it is anyway.

January 26th is Australia Day, it's a national holiday where we celebrate Australianness in all its richness and whatnot; it also neatly marks the end of the summer holidays and we know that afterwards the kids all go back to school, business picks up again and things get back to normal. So far so good. I do think it's good to have a national day like this.

But why January 26th? The anniversary of the founding of the commonwealth of australia? No. The anniversary of our declaring our independence from Britain? No! The invention of vegemite? The founding of the Carlton football club? No. The official website's a bit shy about this but if you dig a bit you find that it's the anniversary of the landing at Sydney Cove of the First Fleet. So it really has not much at all to do with the founding of Australia as a country - it's an important date it its own right, but it's to do with the founding of Sydney as a penal colony, a colony which was never expected to amount to much (except to make sure the French didn't end up here). So call it Sydney Day. Or Convict Day. Or Botany Bay Wasn't What Cook Said It Was So We Found This Other Place A Couple Days Later Day.

On an unrelated note (and this was triggered by my facetious reference to Australia declaring its independence from the UK) in the mid90s I was living in London and I was a member of the UK chapter of the Australian Republican movement. We'd meet once in a while in a smokey pub near the Hammersmith flyover and talk about.. I can't remember. Anyway, I had to leave the UK, and I sent them a letter saying that my membership was going to lapse, and that it was because I was leavng the country. I couldn't resist adding that I was moving back to a country that had won its independence from England through armed struggle.