Invasion Day Misfits Start The Party Early

The anti-Australia Day misfits, I’m sorry to report, have kicked off their revelry a day early this year. On Thursday morning, passersby in Melbourne CBD reported to police the vandalism of the Queen Victoria statue, which had been doused in red paint. More daringly, the criminals also took an angle grinder to Captain Cook’s statue in St Kilda and spray painted ‘The Colony Will Fall’ on its base.

Not much about this is surprising, really. January 26 and its lead-up is the favourite time of the year of radicals and Aboriginal activists, despite all their fashionable whining about the ongoing trauma and bruised feelings the date allegedly causes. Moreover, the defeat of the Voice referendum last year has provoked a desire for revenge against the broader Australian public, so the protestors were always going to be noisier and more annoying than usual this time around.

What’s also unsurprising is the reaction from academics and professional activists, who have had their hearts stirred by this act of iconoclasm. Dr Amy McQuire found it absolutely hilarious that only Cook’s boots remained on the pedestal. A photo of the remains, she declared, would be framed and put in her office, presumably at the School of Communications at the Queensland University of Technology.

Tarneen Onus Browne, an organiser for the Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, was slightly more articulate than usual when she posted her own reaction on X, which appears atop this page. Onus Browne is perhaps best known for her zeal in advocating arson as a method of social change. Quadrant readers will remember her expletive-heavy call for Australia to be “burnt to the ground” at the Invasion Day rally in Melbourne in 2018. I doubt, though, that her fondness for mere vandalism is an indication of any softening of her political radicalism.

Hhahahahaahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahhaahhahaha pic.twitter.com/HejGtDygzY

— Tarneen (@tarneen) January 24, 2024

The most deranged response came from — and no prizes for guessing who — Claire G. Coleman, an award-winning Aboriginal trans novelist who identifies as a black lesbian, gushed about the toppling of Cook’s statue and expressed admiration for its topplers. Her chirpy tone vanished, though, in a follow-up message for those who might raise any objections: “Give us all our land back, which is 100% of the continent, and then you are welcome to f*** off…”

On second glance, there is an additional theme to this year’s round of Australia Day-bashing, and it ought to put us all a bit more on edge. Ever since Hamas’ pogrom on October 7, Aboriginal and Palestinian activists have been drawn ever closer, united in their loathing of ‘settler-colonial’ societies, like Australia and Israel. It’s little wonder, then, that the protests planned for January 26 this year have a few extra items on the agenda.

Gary Foley, the skilful and indefatigable demagogue, sent out the invitations at one of Melbourne’s recent pro-Hamas get-togethers, where he declared: “Let’s make it a joint Palestinian/Aboriginal Invasion Day on the 26th of January.” Community organisation Free Palestine Melbourne, which has helped promote the ubiquitous street protests and port disruptions of late, immediately RSVP-ed. The group has encouraged its tens of thousands of social media followers living in — as they insist on calling it — Naarm or so-called Melbourne to join the causes. They write: “The resistance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on these lands and seas guides us towards freedom from white supremacy and Zionism.” To all this they add the usual stuff about climate justice, the stolen land and their ultimate goal, which is to “abolish Australia”.

The vandals who scrawled ‘This Colony Will Fall’ on the Cook statue’s base are obviously motivated by this stupidly sinister worldview, which leads them and their cheerleaders to believe they really are bringing to an end Australian society and the nation as we know it. It was summed up nicely, in a way, by Randa Abdel-Fattah, an Australian-Palestinian Future Fellow at Macquarie University. She looked on the broken statue of Cook as a harbinger of more destruction, which one suspects she would like to see on a more regular basis. She wrote: “This energy everyday (sic). All colonies will fail starting here.”

She wrote: “This energy everyday (sic). All colonies will fail starting here.”

If there’s one positive to take from all this, it may be a growing understanding of just how off-topic the Australia Day ‘debate’ really is. This week cricketer Pat Cummins made the headlines for calling on the government to “find a more appropriate date” for the annual celebration. As well-meaning as I think Cummins and many like him are, they’re also, to put it mildly, completely deluded. They ought to realise that there is no “appropriate date” to celebrate Australia for an activist and academic class that seeks Australia’s abolition. Changing the date, I suspect, won’t put the Invasion Day organisers and protestors in a cheerier state of mind. There’s no point in trying to accommodate and appease people who hate you and hate the country that we have to share.

If Melbourne’s vandals, in their own messy way, have brought all this to wider attention, they may have accidentally done a bit of good work. The same could also be said for the Aboriginal radicals who ally with the local Palestinian Hamasniks and do a pretty good job of discrediting their own cause.

Still, it might be wise to cultivate a bit more annoyance with these activist and academic types, on Australia Day, yes, but also every day. After all, as they go on and on about the need for Australia and Israel to be decolonised, by which they mean the end of those countries’ existences, it’s worth recalling that the destruction of statues is just an example of the more moderate plans they have in mind.

Timothy Cootes lives in Sydney. He wrote most recently on the lies, character and career of the odious John Pilger