It is Australia Day here in Australia today or was it yesterday (Timezones, they are tricky). Our national day. A time to celebrate all that it means to be Australian, which of course is a complex thing, because Australia is a complex place. Many websites will claim it's the most multi-cultural nation on earth, just as many websites claim it isn't. But 31% of the people who live here where born overseas (including me) and gets up to 43% for people aged 35-39.
The concept of being Australian is even more complex, there is the stereotype of Aussie-ness, sort of a Crocodile Dundee, mixed with Steve Irwin, crossed with a 1980's Cricketer, maybe Dennis Lillee pre carpet call ads or Thommo or Marshy or someone else with that type of nickname. But this isn't really what life is like in Australia - 86.6% of us live in cities, more than France, Germany, the UK, or the US. Most of us have never stepped foot on a farm, or played cricket
and then of course there are the First Nations people, here for thousands of years, this is not a single culture, but many, and I'm not going to pretend to understand them all or speak for all of them but it is a truly amazing complex series of cultures and we have a human history far longer than the Pyramids, seeing artwork that was painted 30,000 years ago (in that outback most haven't been to, eventhough we have visited the Coliseum) is truly outstanding.
And why is it today? - the 26th of January, well that's the day Europeans turned up, and that is why the day is not universally celebrated, many believe that using a date of when the conquers turned up as the celebration point is in pretty poor taste, and we need to acknowledge that the land is stolen land. Which let's face it almost every country is, unless you were ruled by the white man for a few hundred years and then got independence.
But you see' Australia' doesn't have a big flashy date that everything changed (but the first nations people do, the 26th of January). We never had a big fight with the British Crown and declared independence, no, we just sort of drifted apart after the second world war when it became apparent that the English weren't going to save us from the Japanese and that American Fella might be better bet. And now, well, we like a few different people, we are more part of Asia (or at least dependent on the Chinese Economy) than the UK, although there is a far amount of that baseline Englishness in our culture, we try to get along with everyone.
It would have been useful if we had a date that could have marked when we became a country (rather than a collection of colonies on the same island) but, in what I assumed was the best new years resolution ever, they did that on 1st of January in 1901, and we already get a holiday for that so there is no point using that date, because if Australian's love anything it's a holiday.
I have heard some thoughts that the date of celebration should be the anniversary of when the British decided we could become a federation which is 5 July 1900 for the parliament and Queen Victoria signed the Act on 9 July 1900. but that's winter, and no one wants a public holiday in Winter. And besides this is like saying the moment your Mum says you can go out to play is the when you started playing, nope, it's when you round up your friends, put some gaffer tape on a tennis ball and bowl the first bowl.
Of course maybe if we ever become a republic we can choose a better date. Because here's the thing that gets lost, no one has a problem with celebrating everything that is amazing about Australia, becuase there is a look, including our First Nations Culture, our Multi-culturalism, our (largely English) history, we just need a date which isn't a reminder of what is lost for some people.
It's complex, which is why when I say that artwork above (which has had a number of iterations in Melbourne for about 10 years now) on Friday and took the shot it got me thinking about these things.
