Recently an Australia Day billboard featuring two girls in hijab sparked an outcry on social media, and was taken down following threats directed at the company behind the ad.
Following a backlash against the backlash, a crowdfunding campaign raised $130,000 to get the billboard back up. Then there was another backlash from Indigenous groups for whom celebrating the day at all is mortifyingly offensive. Then a backlash against that.
It's hard not to notice that, as far as national holidays go, Australia Day is, well, a bit rubbish.
Most countries celebrate some defining moment – a revolution, a peace treaty, a declaration of independence, things a country can be proud of, whereas every January 26, we are at our most divided.
For some of us, January 26 is a day to solemnly reflect on the carnage enacted on the First People following European settlement. For others, it's an opportunity to co-ordinate our Southern Cross tattoos with a cape and have a lovely day at the racists'. Many more of us just want to quietly drink and grunt approvingly at a Weber BBQ.
The question begs – what is Australia Day for? Pride? Shame? Overt, flag-waving patriotism, is, well, UnAustralian.
Since our default mode seems to be an uneasy, relaxed egalitarianism, it shouldn't be so hard to figure out what to do with the day.
We could, if we tried, find something else to capture the Australian spirit.
We could #ChangeTheDate
A growing movement acknowledges that January 26 marks the date of a dispossession, and that to celebrate it as a national holiday is offensive to those wronged. The solution proposed by this faction is simple: change the date.
It wouldn't be the first time – January 26 has only been marked as Australia Day across all states and territories since 1994. Before then, it shifted from Monday to Monday to fit with long weekends.
The thing is, few of our traditions run that deep. Advance Australia Fair, for instance, was written by a Scottish immigrant at the end of the 19th century who sold the song to the government for £100, and was only adopted as the National Anthem in 1984, when it was dusted off to replace God Save The Queen.
The lyrics, too, were updated, dropping the verses about how any foreign invaders would have their asses kicked by the Scots and Irish, and adding new lines extolling "golden soil and wealth for toil" and "land abounds in nature's gifts", making ours the first national anthem that is explicitly a real-estate jingle. Times change.
We could celebrate something less genocide-y
For many Australians of British heritage, the Gallipoli massacre is the only sombre, revered day of mourning, but then nobody asks us to celebrate that with Iskender kebab and a rousing game of paintball.
We could try to be a little bit sensitive, cobbers. There are any number of dates we could move that are less insulting and injurious to Indigenous Australians. We could even pick another war if we had to.
Perhaps November 2, the outbreak of 1932's Emu War, in which a machine-gun battalion of WWI veterans, under orders of the Minister of Defense, were (twice) deployed against 20,000 migrating emus that were fouling wheat crops in Western Australia – and lost.
If you want an event that captures the belligerence, absurdity and deeply ruinous nature of modern Australian patriotism, the emus have my vote.
We hijack another holiday
In Finland, Sweden North America, the UK, they celebrate an annual "buy nothing day", where people deliberately spend no money as a day for society to examine the issue of over-consumption.
I say we steal this, and expand it to include a blanket ban on ads for lamb, as well as editorials written about ads for lamb.
Let's all just chill, and not have an opinion for a day. Let's see if we can.
We could just not turn up
There's nothing more Australian than ignoring a problem and hoping it goes away. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry estimates 180,000 people will chuck a sickie this year, costing $62 million in lost GDP.
We may as well just formalise it, and all call in sick, and so we can stay home hungover and think about what we've done.
It could start with a ceremonial moment of silence, while the nation comes together as one, calls HR and puts on a croaky voice to lie about having gastro.
Which, we can all agree, is Australian as.
Does Australia Day need an overhaul? Let us know in the Comments section.
Comments