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It was just six months before the Myall Creek massacre, where 11 stockmen rounded
up and slaughtered a group of 30 Aboriginal men, women and children. After two
trials, and a fierce public debate over whether the killing of Aboriginal people was even
considered a crime, seven stockmen were hanged.
An anonymous correspondent to the Australian newspaper, published on 8 December
1838, claimed that one of the jurors who acquitted the men at the first trial had said:
“I know well that they were guilty of the murder, but I, for one, would never see a white
man suffer for shooting a black.”
Poster advertising the 1938 day of mourning. Photograph: Couresty of Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Changing the date of Australia Day won’t change that history or other injustices done
to Australia’s first peoples, but supporters of the movement say it would acknowledge
that the establishment of modern Australia was more contested and bloody than the
national mythology has previously held.
Both the government and the opposition have used the immutability of history as an
argument for continuing to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January, because to do
otherwise would be a denial of history.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander views on Australia Day range from acceptance to
abolition, with those who want to change the date occupying a broad swath in the
middle.
Liddle says that if the full spectrum of Australia’s post-1788 history was acknowledged,
including the many and ongoing injustices to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
peoples, Australia Day would not be celebrated at all. It’s a catalogue of issues that
shifting a public holiday will not fix.
“Aboriginal people don’t march because we’re unhappy with the date of celebration,”
she said. “We march because we’re strongly opposed to our invasion being celebrated
… Just changing the date is not going to address the deep social issues that we’re
fighting for here.
“I think that people who are promoting the change the date thing need to be really
really cautious that it’s not just the changing of a nationalistic celebration to another
day without concern for the real reasons why it is that we’re out there.”
Labor MP Linda Burney, the first Indigenous woman elected to the federal House of
Representatives, had a similar concern. She said a recent push by the Australian
Greens to encourage local governments to support changing the date, following a
number of councils voting in 2017 to move their celebrations to a less contentious
day, was “a very narrow way to look at the issue of Indigenous affairs”.
Instead, she said, the focus should be on making progress to implement the ideas in
the Uluru Statement, the principal recommendation of which was rejected by the
Turnbull government in October for being unpalatably ambitious.