At the turn of this century, amid growing progressive and Indigenous hostility towards January 26, then NSW premier Bob Carr penned an impassioned defence of the rightness of the date as our national holiday.
Bob Carr presaged the national self-loathing behind the campaign to axe January 26 with an honest and historically based argument in support of the status quo. His piece argued that like any colonised country, Australia’s history was not without brutality or pain, but that none of that hardship could be air-brushed via some symbolic adjustment to the holiday calendar.
Carr also stated that all citizens in the modern nation created by the arrival of the English had benefited collectively from the introduction of the rule of law, noting that it was English law that saw the seven perpetrators of the Myall Creek massacre hanged for the murder of 28 Aboriginal men, women and children in 1838.
“January 26 is the day the whole brave, self-mocking, patient, largely successful exercise in nation-building began,” Carr wrote in Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph on January 22, 2000.
“It is the one day that speaks of all that happened: the good and bad, the inspiring and shaming. The story of us all.
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There is no alternative. It is altogether appropriate. Well used, it will tell future generations what really happened – the brutality, the heroism, the tenderness, the patience. It will teach the humility as well as pride. Advance the Australian fair go and its inevitable symbol, Australia Day. There is no other day that says it all.”
We must never give in to the noisy, stupid ratbags who stand only for cancel culture, resentment, statue toppling, shouty vandalism.
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