Australia Day is currently January 26th, the date that the First Fleet from England arrived in Sydney Cove 237 years ago. Over the last decade or so this date has become more and more controversial as awareness of colonial violence of settlers against Aboriginal people spreads. I propose a change to the 25th of September, a day in which Aboriginal woman Cathy Freeman won a Gold Medal in the 400 metres race at Sydney’s 2000 Olympics.
This achievement was quintessentially Australian - the event gathered 112,000 people from around the world, to witness an indigenous woman from Mackay in far North Queensland beat seven other runners from countries whose population averaged out to be four times greater than Australia’s at the time, held in a modern day Coliseum that was built by around 40,000 people with a contribution of $690 million from the taxpayer.
Many pundits older than me claim that this era in Sydney’s history was its peak - the nightlife was going off and household disposable income was growing, factors that have completely reversed since. The Australian state of Victoria pulled out of hosting another international athletic event, the Commonwealth Games, in 2023, representing $589 million in unreturned taxpayer expenditure, attributed to government agencies not working together properly. The politician responsible for the proposed Games, Jacinta Allen, is now the state’s premier.
We need to champion competency and a fair go for everybody, whether you’re from the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney or the croc infested waters in far North Queensland. This proposed new date for Australia Day would fall in early Spring - the traditional Aussie national day ritual of swimming and barbecuing might be less appealing at that time of year - but it’d be a celebration of getting through winter, would break up the year a bit as most Australian public holidays are in the first third of the year, and would hopefully put an end to the divisiveness of the current date.
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