*&^%$#@!  /  * Day

In late January the country performs a small miracle of selective attention. We turn up the music, we pull a plastic chair into the shade, we talk about how lucky we are; we feel, many of us, an untroubled affection for the ordinary decent life we’ve built here. And then, almost as background noise, we ask a First Nations person to do the impossible – to stand inside that affection, to smile at the same symbols, to treat the same date as a benign birthday, while knowing that the date’s elevation to national holiness is inseparable from a beginning that did not ask permission. It is a demand that some Australians pay for other Australians’ comfort with the currency of their own history.

The most stubborn fault in the Australia Day debate is the insistence that it is a debate about taste – about whether people should be allowed to “celebrate Australia,” about whether “both sides” could calm down, about whether we might add a solemn acknowledgement before the fireworks and call it a balanced approach. But public holidays are instruments of civic formation. A national day is a day on which the state teaches the nation who it is, and what it owes itself. The calendar is one of the quietest and most effective political technologies we possess. It organises memory. It distributes honour. It creates a rhythm in which some facts become normal and others become “controversial.” And because it is repeated, it becomes hard to see. It slides under argument and into atmosphere. That is why it matters.

If we want to see what is really happening, we should begin where the argument always tries not to begin – with time itself, with the scale of this continent’s human story. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived here for at least 65,000 years. Say the number out loud and feel its resistance to the way settler culture narrates “Australia.” Sixty-five thousand years is a civilisational fact so enormous that it makes the colonising period look like a thin scratch on a very old surface. Yet the national myth insists, quietly but relentlessly, that the country begins when the British arrive. We are trained to speak as though history starts with documentation, as though law begins with British ink, as though the continent becomes real when it becomes legible to empire. This is an epistemic conquest. It is the first act of taking – taking time from other people, taking their prior sovereignty and turning it into a kind of “before,” a prelude, a cultural mood-board.

Long before 1788, there were laws here. There were ways of holding people accountable, ways of defining responsibility to land and kin, ways of adjudicating disputes, ways of regulating access to water, food, ceremony, marriage, obligation. “Country” in this sense is an ethical and juridical concept; it names a relationship. But colonial narration works by flattening these realities into sentiment – beautiful, spiritual, tragic, but not binding. That flattening is convenient. If First Nations law is treated as culture rather than jurisdiction, then sovereignty can be spoken as though it arrived on ships. The great trick of settler modernity is to recognise Indigenous people as human beings and still deny their political standing. That denial lives, very comfortably, inside our festivals.

Even within the British story, the “beginning” is not as simple as the calendar pretends. In 1770, James Cook claimed the east coast for Britain and named it New South Wales. Whatever one thinks of Cook as a person, the moral structure of the act is plain – a claim made over people who were not consulted, carried out through the imperial confidence that sovereignty is something you can announce into existence. The claim is a template for everything that follows – the conversion of inhabited land into a legal abstraction available for administration, the treatment of existing law as irrelevant noise, the invention of a vacant continent in the imperial imagination. If the later phrase “terra nullius” has become shorthand for a legal fiction, it is worth remembering that the fiction was never confined to courtrooms. It was cultural. It was the moral permission slip for a society that wanted the benefits of possession without the discomfort of acknowledging what possession required.

Then, in January 1788, the First Fleet arrived and the colonial project began in the place we now call Sydney Cove, Warrane, on Gadigal Country. The landing is saturated with symbolism – the ships, the shore, the flag, the impression of a world being “founded.” It has the dramatic clarity that modern nation-states crave. Yet the state did not have to choose that moment as the centre of our civic joy. It chose it. The government of the colony was formally proclaimed on 7 February 1788, when official instruments were read out in the early settlement. If we were simply looking for a date that marked the establishment of colonial governance, 7 February would be the cleaner candidate. But 7 February is not as cinematic. It is administration, not arrival. The landing gives the nation a theatre of beginnings that is all motion and confidence, a beginning scene in which the coloniser’s presence is framed as history itself. The choice of 26 January tells us what kind of story the country wants to tell about itself – not the story of legal formality, but the story of arrival as entitlement.

From that chosen scene, the continent is remade. This is where Australian public memory becomes evasive. We like to say “settlement” because it is gentle. We like to say “pioneers” because it is brave. We like to say “development” because it sounds inevitable. But the record is not gentle, brave, or inevitable. The frontier was not a misunderstanding. It was a contest over land, law, life. Across the continent, there were killings, reprisals, punitive expeditions, and massacres, there is now a substantial body of public historical work documenting colonial frontier violence, including massacre research projects and museum resources that treat these events as constitutive to colonisation rather than as aberrations. Our duty now is to ask contemporary people not to sanctify the initiating moment of a project that required such violence, and not to treat the consequences as mere “complexity” that can be tidily balanced by a respectful acknowledgement.

Violence, however, is only one strand of the colonial apparatus. Another strand is control, exercised under the language of care. The nineteenth-century “protection” regimes are a case study in moral camouflage. In Victoria, the Aboriginal Protection Act 1869 established a Board for the Protection of Aborigines, formalising state authority to intervene in Aboriginal lives. Protection, when enacted by a colonising state, often means the opposite of what it claims. It means the regulation of movement, labour, residence, relationships. It means the conversion of a people into a managed population. It means the state reserving to itself the right to decide what kinds of lives Indigenous people are permitted to live. It is the bureaucratic face of domination – domination that smiles, domination that keeps records, domination that insists it is for your own good.

The forced removal of children, and the long grief gathered under the name “Stolen Generations,” belongs to this history of control. The Bringing Them Home report, tabled in Parliament in 1997, documented the laws and practices that produced removals and made recommendations for acknowledgement and repair. The Apology delivered in 2008 acknowledged the harm of those policies at the highest level of the state. The important thing to notice is not that Australia has apologised. The important thing to notice is that we have learned, at least momentarily, to name some parts of our history as wrong. If we can do that in Parliament, we can do it in the calendar. If we can say, publicly, that certain policies were grievous and unjust, we can also say that it is ethically incoherent to locate the nation’s principal celebration on a date that has become, for many, a yearly reminder of dispossession’s beginning.

The defenders of 26 January often respond with a kind of sentimental absolutism. They speak as if the date were sacred, unchangeable, embedded in the soil. Yet the history of the date as “Australia Day” is itself a history of invention and consolidation. Governor Macquarie marked the 30th anniversary of the landing in 1818, an early official commemoration of the event that later becomes linked to the national day. The day’s meaning and observance shifted across time and place, its modern, national uniformity is not ancient. The public holiday’s standardisation on the actual date across the country is tied to late twentieth-century decisions, including moves in the 1990s to align observance nationally. In other words, the thing presented as immovable tradition is policy, repeated until it feels like destiny.

And even more importantly, the date has never belonged to only one tradition. The country likes to describe protest as a new intrusion into an old party. History says the opposite. On 26 January 1938, Aboriginal activists held a Day of Mourning at Australia Hall in Sydney in response to sesquicentenary celebrations, protesting the treatment of Aboriginal people and demanding political rights. This was a declaration that the date’s public meaning was already morally contested, that celebration on that day required a kind of willed deafness, that the nation’s joy was being built on an instruction to Indigenous people – be quiet, be grateful, be invisible.

In 1972, on 26 January, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established opposite Parliament House, making the claim of unceded sovereignty visible in the most direct possible way – by occupying the symbolic space of the state with the presence the state’s story wanted to manage. The Embassy is often spoken of as if it were merely an activist landmark. But it is also an ethical critique in physical form. It says – the nation you celebrate is unfinished, the legitimacy you assume is contested, the land you treat as settled is not settled. That it began on 26 January is not incidental. It is a deliberate counter-ritual. It interrupts the state’s annual performance of innocence.

This brings us to what I take to be the most revealing, and the most indefensible, element of contemporary Australia Day practice – the staging of citizenship ceremonies on 26 January. Citizenship ceremonies are the moment in which the state makes membership visible, in which new citizens make the pledge and are welcomed into the political community. The Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code states that ceremonies should be held on “days of significance,” explicitly including Australia Day (26 January) and Australian Citizenship Day (17 September). So the state actively encourages this pairing.

What does it mean, ethically, to welcome new Australians into citizenship on a day that many First Nations people rightly experience as invasion? It means we are inducting new citizens into a civic identity whose origin story is still settler-centred. We are asking them, often without their informed consent, to participate in a ritual that treats colonisation’s initiating moment as a suitable setting for national inclusion. We are doing inclusion as theatre while leaving the moral architecture of exclusion untouched. That is why it feels so hollow when public officials describe the day as “for everyone.” Inclusion is not merely a matter of inviting everyone to the party. Inclusion is a matter of whether the party’s theme requires some of the invited guests to pretend their history is not what it is.

The historical irony deepens, because citizenship itself was formally tied to 26 January. On 26 January 1949, the Nationality and Citizenship Act came into effect, creating the legal concept of Australian citizenship where previously Australians were treated as British subjects in law. The state deliberately braided the birth of “citizenship” into the anniversary of colonial beginning. The symbolic message is not subtle – membership is grounded in arrival. The nation becomes itself when the ships come, and citizenship becomes itself on the anniversary of that arrival. It is a neat narrative, neat enough to conceal the moral violence it depends on.

When a society ties its membership ritual to a colonisation anniversary, it is making a claim about legitimacy. It is saying – our belonging flows from this origin. It is saying – our political community begins here. It is saying – the story you join is this story. And if you want to see why the argument about Australia Day will not go away, look at that claim, it is a matter of whose sovereignty counts as foundational.

At this point the conversation often becomes psychologically revealing. Many non-Indigenous Australians respond as though critique of 26 January were critique of themselves. They hear, “you are personally guilty,” when what is actually being said is, “your nation’s ritual life is ethically incoherent.” They hear, “you cannot love your country,” when what is being asked is, “can you love your country truthfully?” They hear, “you must feel ashamed,” when what is being required is a willingness to rearrange public meaning so that the state’s joy is not built on someone else’s humiliation.

This is where the phrase “we can’t change history” appears, as if it were a serious argument. It is not. Changing the date does not change the historical facts. It changes what we honour. It changes what we ask one another to affirm. The defenders of the date want the state to keep awarding the nation’s highest public joy to a settler beginning scene, and they want Indigenous protest to remain a regrettable but manageable interruption. That is why they are so committed to “keeping politics out of it.” What they mean is – keep Indigenous politics out of it. The state’s politics, the politics of choosing 26 January as the nation’s day, must remain invisible, because if it becomes visible it can be judged.

Judged by what standard? By the standard a democracy claims to hold – that its citizens have equal standing, that their histories count, that their grief is not an inconvenience, that their political testimony is not a nuisance. The problem with 26 January is that we have chosen, with determination, to celebrate ourselves on a date whose mixedness is not incidental but constitutive – a date that signifies, in its national elevation, the triumph of a colonising project over Indigenous jurisdiction.

And because the nation is not merely a story but an institution, the harm is not only symbolic. Symbolic harm is real harm in political communities. It is one of the ways unequal standing is maintained. When the state insists that the national day must be 26 January, it is saying, each year, with the force of ritual, that Indigenous pain can be acknowledged but not allowed to reorganise public life. It is saying that truth can be spoken but must not displace celebration. It is saying that the most morally significant fact about the date, that it marks the onset of colonisation, is something we can sideline as “divisive” in order to preserve the mood of unity.

The way out of this is to design public time more honestly. Australia has been trapped in the childish idea that unity requires one day, one mood, one story. It is a strangely thin conception of a nation, especially a nation that tells itself it is mature, multicultural, confident. Adults do not need to force celebration and reckoning into a single afternoon. Adults can hold more than one kind of day.

The obvious, principled compromise is this – keep 26 January, but stop pretending it should be the main day of national celebration. Turn it into a national day of truth-telling and reckoning, a day that acknowledges what the date is and what it has meant, a day that faces the history rather than trying to drown it in noise. It treats truth as a civic obligation rather than a personal hobby. It accepts that the date already carries a counter-tradition of mourning and protest, 1938, 1972, and the many Invasion Day marches since, and it stops treating that tradition as an irritation to be policed. It gives the nation an authorised space to say, publicly, that colonisation was not benign, that its consequences persist, that sovereignty was never ceded, that the modern state exists on contested ground.

A truth-telling day should be the kind of day that makes the nation’s moral accounting concrete – the kind of day on which the country’s institutions do more than perform acknowledgement, they report, they measure, they confront continuing injustice without euphemism. We already have the administrative capacity to do this. We publish budgets. We publish economic statements. We publish national security briefings. The refusal to publish a yearly moral account of colonisation’s ongoing consequences is not a capacity problem. It is a will problem. If the state can choreograph citizenship ceremonies, it can choreograph public truth. If the state can choreograph fireworks, it can choreograph accountability.

But if 26 January becomes a day of truth and reckoning, then the country also needs a day of celebration that can plausibly belong to everyone without requiring First Nations people to swallow the insult of being asked to celebrate invasion. This is where many proposals become either thin or contentious. You can choose Federation and end up celebrating a constitutional arrangement that did not include First Nations people as equal partners. You can choose a court decision and end up collapsing legal recognition into national belonging. You can choose a referendum and end up mythologising it into a substitute for structural change. Australia needs a date that can be carried by a civic idea fit for a plural democracy – belonging as commitment, not belonging as conquest.

The cleanest candidate is already embedded in civic practice – 17 September, Australian Citizenship Day. The government already treats it as a day on which Australians reflect on citizenship and welcome new citizens, and the ceremonies code already names it as a day of significance for ceremonies. In other words, the date already has a civic purpose that aligns with the moral work we want a national day to perform. It is about the present, not the conquest. It is about chosen membership, not imposed sovereignty. It is about a democratic “we” that can be expanded through consent and commitment rather than through arrival and assertion.

Make 17 September the principal national day of celebration, and make citizenship ceremonies the centrepiece of that celebration. Do not treat citizenship as a decorative extra attached to 26 January. Put it where it belongs – at the heart of the day that the nation uses to describe itself. It changes the story the state tells. It says – our pride is not in the landing; our pride is in the ongoing practice of democratic belonging. It says – you can love Australia without needing to sanctify colonisation as the foundation of your joy. It says – new citizens are welcomed into a nation that is honest about its history and serious about its future, not into a nation that asks them to lend their smiling faces to the management of a moral wound.

Some will say changing the national day does not fix material injustice. True. But the defenders of the status quo cannot have it both ways. They cannot say the date is too trivial to change and too sacred to move. They cannot say symbolism does not matter while insisting that the nation’s identity collapses if the party is moved. The truth is that symbolism matters precisely because it shapes what a nation thinks it owes. A country that insists on celebrating itself on 26 January trains itself to experience colonisation as settled history. A country that consecrates 26 January to truth-telling trains itself to experience colonisation as unfinished business. That difference matters for policy, for education, for the public’s tolerance of reform. It matters for whether the country can even imagine treaty and truth as normal rather than as extremist demands. It matters for whether the public treats Indigenous claims as reasonable moral testimony or as an endless complaint.

Others will say that a truth-telling day sounds like self-hatred. This is another psychological confession masquerading as an argument – the idea that the only alternative to self-congratulation is self-loathing. It is a strangely adolescent view of national character. The better alternative is moral adulthood. Adult love is not blind. Adult love can face wrongdoing without collapsing into nihilism. Adult love can say, “this was done in our name, and we will not pretend it was fine.”

The most revealing objection will be the one that says, quietly or loudly, that Indigenous people should simply accept the date because “it happened so long ago.” In this objection, time is treated as absolution. But time absolves nothing when institutions keep renewing the wound. The annual insistence that 26 January is the nation’s birthday is itself an ongoing act. It is an act done now, not then. And it is done against a background of continuing inequity – disproportionate incarceration, health gaps, child removals, the everyday realities of racism, and the deeper constitutional reality that sovereignty remains unresolved. A nation that continues to disadvantage Indigenous people materially while asking them to smile through a celebratory commemoration of is ethically grotesque.

It is also, frankly, politically foolish. The country spends enormous energy every January re-litigating the same question, burning civic trust, splitting communities, forcing local councils into culture-war battles, turning what could be a season of civic generosity into a season of resentment. If the point of a national day is unity, then the current arrangement fails on its own stated terms. But I do not want to make the argument on utilitarian grounds, only justice.

Justice begins, in a settler democracy, with the refusal to make Indigenous people do the emotional work required to preserve settler innocence. It begins with the refusal to treat Indigenous protest as an inconvenience. It begins with the recognition that “acknowledgement” is not reconciliation when the calendar remains untouched. It begins with a willingness to redistribute public honour so that the country’s joy is not performed over someone else’s injury.

The truth-telling day on 26 January would not be an exercise in moral theatre for its own sake. It would be a national commitment to remember properly – to remember the continent’s deep time, to remember the imperial claiming, to remember the arrival at Warrane and the formal establishment of governance, to remember frontier violence and protection regimes, to remember the forced removals and the long struggle for recognition, to remember the Day of Mourning and the Embassy and the continuing refusal to let colonisation be rebranded as benign. It would be, in the best sense, an interruption of the national habit of taking comfort as a civic right. It would say – you do not get to be innocent just because you would like to feel innocent.

The celebratory day on 17 September would then have room to be what a national day should be in a plural democracy – a day on which the state does not ask anyone to deny their history in order to belong. It would allow the country to celebrate what is genuinely worth celebrating, its capacity for inclusion, its ordinary decencies, its democratic aspirations, without building those celebrations on a foundation that many citizens experience as a yearly insult. And it would allow citizenship ceremonies to be what they claim to be – a welcome into an ethical community, not a welcome into a sanitised myth.

There is a particular obscenity in the current practice of using citizenship ceremonies on 26 January as evidence that the day is “inclusive.” It is a kind of moral laundering – proof-by-photo-op. Look, we say, at the new citizens smiling, therefore the date cannot be unjust. But the smile of the welcomed is not a moral permission slip to ignore the dispossessed. It is precisely the opposite. The fact that people from all over the world can become Australians should sharpen our ethical imagination, not narrow it. If we can build a community of shared citizenship across difference, then surely we can build a calendar that does not demand Indigenous people accept a celebratory commemoration of invasion as the price of membership.

The most honest response to this proposal is to ask whether it aligns the nation’s ritual life with its professed values. We claim to value fairness. We claim to value respect. We claim to value democratic equality. We claim to value truth. If we mean those claims, then the current arrangement is untenable. A society that keeps its party on 26 January is a society that has chosen, repeatedly, to privilege settler comfort over Indigenous standing. And a society that welcomes new citizens on that same day is a society that uses inclusion as a mask for unresolved injustice.

The country does not need a perfect date. It needs an honest one. It needs a civic architecture that can hold both truth and celebration without forcing them into a single moral confusion. It needs, above all, to stop asking First Nations people to accommodate the nation’s denial. Keeping 26 January as a day of truth and reckoning and moving the national celebration, with citizenship ceremonies, to 17 September is an act of institutional decency. It is a refusal of the annual humiliation built into the current ritual. It is a step toward a nation that can bear the weight of its own story without flinching.

If Australia wants to be a mature democracy, it must become capable of a simple act – placing joy where it can be shared, and placing truth where it can be faced. It is what adulthood looks like when a nation has the courage to stop confusing comfort with virtue.

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