Irrespective of whether the politicians shift Australia’s annual orgy of self-congratulation from 26 January, it will always thrive for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and those who support betterment of their rights, as a national day of mourning.



It doesn’t matter how ridiculously the mainstream political parties rhetorically contort and become tangled in their claims that our dedicated national day can at once be a unifying cause celebre for things Australian and immensely painful for the Indigenous.

And it doesn’t matter the way they’ll cynically pay lip service to Aboriginal endurance at welcomes-to-country, having rejected out of hand Indigenous aspirations, as evidenced most recently by the government’s appalling response to the 2017 Uluru statement from the heart.

It doesn’t matter that significant voices in establishment media cast the predictable “debate” around every recent 26 January as “new” or “fresh”, and Indigenous opposition to celebration as symbolism divorced from the historic struggle for rights to land and housing, education, and better economic and health outcomes.

Symbolism, meanwhile, that stems from the government – most notably the offer of the sketchiest of constitutional recognition – is portrayed as weightier, more worthy.

It matters even less that federal government and opposition members, too gormless to challenge party dictates, cynically attribute the fashion for such apparently novel dissent over 26 January to a third party, the Greens, eager as they are to kickstart the adversarial parliamentary year and gasp political oxygen in the dying she’ll-be-right days of our summer catatonia.

No. None of that matters because, whether or not we celebrate Australian nationhood and culture on 26 January (I firmly believe the Aboriginal and non-Indigenous momentum for change is now close to irresistible), its organised commemoration as a national day of mourning first happened 80 years ago.

As Guardian Australia’s Calla Wahlquist succinctly points out, “Opposition to celebrating on 26 January originated in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community in the late 19th century. The first formal protest was the national day of mourning in Sydney in 1938, 54 years before the Australian Greens were founded.”

By 1938, 26 January had already long been a day black-marked into Indigenous consciousness. It remains a touchstone for the darkest elements of memorised, written, sung, danced and painted Indigenous history, from the countless massacres and orchestrated poisonings, to the chain gangs, the stolen children, and for the continuing deaths in custody, the incarcerations and poverty that shame Australia.

For a comprehensive history of the day of mourning, it’s worth consulting the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. It recounts how, on 26 January 1938, 150 years after Arthur Phillip’s first fleet disembarked its first few prisoners and soldiers, the Aborigines Progressive Association mounted a silent protest to coincide with sesquicentenary celebrations.

They waited as the official parade passed and during a recreation of the fleet’s arrival (it was historically flawed) involving blackfellas from outside Sydney who were imprisoned overnight.

The National Museum of Australia recounts, “Aboriginal people living in Sydney refused to take part so organisers brought in men from Menindee, in western New South Wales, and kept them locked up at the Redfern Police Barracks stables until the re-enactment took place.”

The re-enactment of the landing of Governor Phillip on 26 January 1938. Photograph: State Library of NSW/17955h

Such attempted agency-denying coercion has, of course, been both a characteristic and a shamefully ugly legacy of the British colonial/Indigenous interface in Australia.”

The 100 or so Indigenous protesters, all wearing formal black attire, marched silently from the town hall to Australian Hall in nearby Elizabeth Street, where they passed a resolution that “this being the 150th Anniversary of the Whiteman’s seizure of our country HEREBY MAKE PROTEST against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years ...”

Association founding member Jack Patten said, “On this day the white people are rejoicing, but we, as Aborigines, have no reason to rejoice on Australia’s 150th birthday. Our purpose in meeting today is to bring home to the white people of Australia the frightful conditions in which the native Aborigines of this continent live.

“This land belonged to our forefathers 150 years ago, but today we are pushed further and further into the background. The Aborigines Progressive Association has been formed to put before the white people the fact that Aborigines throughout Australia are literally being starved to death. We refuse to be pushed into the background. We have decided to make ourselves heard.”

The white commemoration of the first fleet arrival on 26 January has a significant official tradition. It stretches back to at least 1818 when Lachlan Macquarie – a hero governor to some contemporary Australian leaders for his supposed enlightenment, who was in fact a ruthless killer of the Indigenes of New South Wales – declared a public holiday for foundation day.

The day has only been consistently celebrated in all states and territories since 1994.

Each year now the Invasion Day protest crowds in the capital cities grow bigger and bigger, proportionate perhaps to the absurdity of some who defend 26 January as a unifying celebration of nationhood.

This year there are some notable contributors, including the prime minister himself, Malcolm Turnbull, “disappointed by those who want to change the date of Australia Day”.

He said, “A free country debates its history, it does not deny it.”

This I find surprising, coming from a leader whose genuine engagement with Indigenous people and their issues has been at best passing, dismissive and condescending, and whose minister for Indigenous affairs, Nigel Scullion, has a demonstrated a cloth ear for Aboriginal voices.

The government has only recently slapped down the request out of Uluru for formal historical truth telling as a means of progressing conciliation between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australia.

What hope for meaningful discussions, then, about the legacies of colonial violence and oppression?

Yes, the simmering truth that burns at the heart of Australian nationhood and sovereignty is disturbing and difficult to confront. It’s a real barbecue stopper in fact – one that serves to ensure 26 January can never be a socially unifying date on our calendar.