Thursday, January 25, 2018

We've Boundless Pains To Share

Where I'm sitting now, on couch, in my home, was, until the late 1700s, the land of the Darug people. Respect to these original custodians, past, present, and future.
On January 26, 1788, the first fleet arrived on Australian shores and with them came the ancestors of my family. It is one event in a history of infinite coincidences that led to my birth. But it is also an event that set into motion a relatively short history of deliberate efforts to take a land from a people, and then to eradicate those people. It is a planned extermination that was frighteningly successful, and it is a mark on our history that we are not nearly as ashamed of as we should be. You may say it's ancient history, that you didn't do it, that you refuse to suffer white guilt because of what some people did hundreds of years ago*.
But there are no Australians free of that legacy. There are no Australians who do not benefit or suffer as a result of what has occurred and what has been perpetrated on the Aboriginal people. The price of white man's burden is blood. The price of luck in this lucky country is blood.
We cannot change history, but we must acknowledge it. We must acknowledge that history is a living narrative, one that touches the present, and for some, history's touch is painful. To celebrate Australia on this day is to revel in the pain that Australia's first people feel from history's white hot grasp. It is fuel for that agonising fire. This statement is not theory, it is not conjecture, it is fact. We know it is fact because they have told us that our celebration hurts.
And that's all you need to know. That's all that matters. It hurts. It hurts people now. To continue calling January 26 Australia Day is to do wrong by the country we're supposed to be celebrating, wrong by the people who make it Australia.
There is so much pain in our history, so much that must be fixed. They will be difficult problems to solve. But this is an easy one. This one has a simple solution.
Change the date.
*Aboriginal children were still being taken from their families in the 1960s. This isn't a crime of hundreds of years ago.