Feature image: Keely Silva, @Deadlydots_
Mamamia only refers to January 26 by its date, to acknowledge that it is not a day of celebration for all Australians. If you want to be an ally this January 26, we urge you to send your MP the letter at the bottom of this page. It's about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which calls for constitutional change and structural reform that recognises the sacred, ancient spiritual link Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have to their land.
For many Australians, January 26 is a date synonymous with murder and invasion. It's the day the British hoisted their flag at Port Jackson, signifying the beginning of two centuries of dispossession, disease epidemics, abuse, forced separation of families, violence, and policies that would permanently destroy elements of Indigenous culture.
As a result, January 26 is referred to by some as Invasion Day, Survival Day, or Day of Mourning. It is not, they argue, a day of celebration, and as a result, the date we call 'Australia Day' needs to change.
Changing the date alone, however, would never be enough. What has to come with symbolic change is a shift in attitudes and recognition of the fact that Australia's history started long before January 26, 1788.
The Uluru Statement from the Heart calls for constitutional change and structural reform that recognises the sacred, ancient spiritual link Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have to their land; a sovereignty that "co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown".
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I can't find the letter? I don't know what part I'm meant to send?
You can write your own, that you support the idea of a treaty. To have a treaty you have to have an us and a them, so you can suggest sorting and tagging people by race and offer ways we can define who is an aboriginal for the purposes of voting and representation. At this point you may however start to get uneasy about where all this is going.
Happy Australia Day. Before sending the letter I’d ask you to consider the following:
1. Voice - we have a Department and a minister for aboriginal affairs. We had ATSIC, a largely unaccountable entity that received over $20 billion in its last decade without showing results commensurate with such spending. I believe we should never have laws that treat people differently based on race as that never works out and indeed is a presage for the darkest acts done by humans in our history.
2. Treaty - a treaty is an agreement between two or more nation states. There is no single democratically elected or otherwise recognised as the leader of the aboriginal race. That’s the first problem. Not a deal breaker, but since we won the conflict, I would expect the treaty to be advantageous to the Crown. At very least an open vote by the electorate if it’s not. You can’t write a treaty with yourself, so understand this requires us to clearly establish there is an “us and a them”. I’m not sure how that brings us all closer together rather than sets us further apart.
3. Truth I believe in, the whole truth, which fairly examines both sides motivations and actions and not simply one side, the infamous, “black armband of history” approach.