Our Unforgiving Age of Pistols at Dawn

Next year, my greeting will be ‘Happy 26^th of January!’ It seems the safest way to put it.

Like most institutions these days – think the Liberal Party and the Catholic Church, just for starters – our nation seems hopelessly divided and descending into a cold civil war.  On just about every issue you can think of there seem to be two semi-armed camps with little interest in compromise and a ‘total war’ mindset.  From Aboriginal affairs and energy policy to climate emergencies and COVID vaccines, it is pistols at dawn.  Take no prisoners.  Never sue for peace.  Never accept defeat, even on issues that seem to have been well and truly settled, like the endless broken record that is the campaign for a republic.

Australia Day (AD) has become well and truly caught up in the warfare.  Every other day now seems to be Aborigines Day.  You would think they and their vociferous champions might grant one day per year, an Aussie Festivus for the rest of us.  (For the record, I have never been that enamoured of celebrating on January 26.  It seems to me it is more Sydney Day than Australia Day, never quite understanding why a Victorian, say, would get remotely excited about commemorating Arthur Phillip and a bunch of criminals coming ashore at Sydney Cove.  My great-great-great-grandfather, Pierce Collits, who arrived in 1801, was given seven years for receiving a very minor amount of stolen calico).

Mind you, this sense of embedded social conflict over things like our national day may simply be the false impression one gets from the chattering classes — the dripping wets, as we used to call the woke – and those with group-based axes to grind who delight in iconoclasm and fomenting rebellion.  They speak very often and very loudly; you cannot turn on a radio or read a news report without hearing from them.  You might say they have a voice.  Out there in normal-land, where people gather for barbecues and such and generally enjoy fellowship on January 26 – some people even dare to fly a flag, which these days might well be seen as a revolutionary (or possibly a racist) act – these debates probably seem very remote and very arcane. 

It isn’t that straightforward, though. 

Cultural symbols are important for free peoples and Australia Day has become a key battleground. In workplaces, for example, you will increasingly be given a choice as to whether you want to take the holiday, even though you maybe weren’t given a choice as to whether you take the COVID jab.  (As an aside, I always thought republicans should be forced to go to work on the Monarch’s birthday).  Councils are now refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day.  Invasion Day protests are clogging streets and open spaces. The ABC, ever helpful to the Left, even publishes on its website the times and places of rallies.  God knows what today’s schoolchildren are told to think about Australia Day.  All these things diminish the event and all that it signifies.  That is, of course, the intention of those who set out to destroy what they see as the evil of patriotism. It’s another scalp for those who want the whole show to come crushing down, to be rebuilt from the ground up in their image.  Just like faith and family, nation is to be obliterated by the cultural revolutionaries and their useful idiots in the agenda-setting institutions, the elites who increasingly determine the content of our lives.  The gloves are off, and we are in a war that the other side does not intend to give up or lose.

Should we change the name of Australia Day as well as the date?

Invasion Day?  I don’t buy it.  It was hardly an invasion according to most definitions of that word.  By the standards of historical invasions, and countries have been invading other countries since Noah was loading up his ark, this was no invasion. And if by linguistic legerdemain you still wish to call it an invasion, it was certainly a pretty benign invasion, given the relative lack of violence that ensued, the massive benefits to the Indigenous of the Brits’ arrival (described below), the subsequent inclusion of Aborigines in the economy and social and political life – yes, this took a long time – and the generous though often misplaced efforts to right the wrongs of colonial life and give Aborigines positive discrimination.

Occupation Day?  It was certainly an occupation of sorts.  From the perspective of the British government in 1788, it was the solution to overcrowded prisons and typical of the way governments think and behave.  The colony lasted against the odds, ultimately to prosper, warts and all.  It has taken 200-plus years to get right the relationship between the increasingly less-British rulers and the locals.

And if wasn’t the British, it would have been someone else.  It was, after all, the age of imperialism, and no one on God’s earth can unsee that.  I was always taken with the late Frank Devine’s line, uttered at the time of the tedious ‘Sorry’ debates, that the Aborigines should just forgive us.  It won’t happen, of course.  Victimhood offers far too many rewards, as we can see from the absolute explosion of self-identifying indigenous in recent times.  Everyone now wants to so identify.  One of the rewards is endless moral superiority, along with all the grants and other material perks.

The whole notion of “first nations” on which the claim of occupation has been built is a post-hoc construct that does not fit the facts of the people who in 1788 sparsely inhabited the continent. The notion of terra nullius, though much disputed by the same chattering classes, has considerable force. 

But let us stipulate that the land down under was occupied on January 26, 1788 and we might still want to ask, ‘What do Aborigines think now about the fruits of the British occupation?’  I say “the fruits”.  I do not mean the justice of it.  As I say, that is a question whose ultimate futility should be obvious to all.   Here we can usefully employ the philosophical method of John Rawls, the eminent late-twentieth century American thinker.  Rawls termed his version of the state of nature, which political philosophers had used for centuries to determine the best form of governance, the “original position” under a “veil of ignorance”.  It is all about ‘consent’ and an implied social contract between the governors and the governed. In other words, what type of government would a rational individual not knowing his future circumstances choose to live under?

Specifically, what might an Aborigine in 1787 have chosen to be his future circumstances? 

Continued hunting and gathering, or something better?  Don’t give me the nonsense about sophisticated agriculture and stone-built towns spouted by Bruce Pascoe. The Aboriginal economy profited massively from the arrival of the industrial-revolutionaries from the northern hemisphere.  Not every Aboriginal life was materially improved quickly, of course.  Yet two centuries later, the large majority of indigenous people are doing well economically, as Gary Johns has pointed out in his recent book, The Burden of Culture (which can be ordered here).

Aboriginal innovation was minimal by international standards.  Western ideas, totally foreign to the Indigenous Australians, of course, have brought their advantages, surely?  For those progressives who, by definition, see the march of history as one of endless progress, both material and moral, it is a little odd to take the side of the noble savage over more sophisticated moderns and to be endlessly cheering a culture that, on any reasonable assessment, was (and in many parts still is) patriarchal, misogynist, abusive and violent.

What about giving up sovereignty, though?  Was that element of the implied Rawlsian bargain worth it?  Aborigines didn’t formally get to vote until 1962 (though many had been doing so long before that), but they do, as individuals, have more of a say in the way they are governed than they did in 1787.  They don’t get everything they want – assuming they agreed with one another about what they want – but neither do other Australians.

No, I am not convinced that the Aborigine of 1787 would have chosen more of the same life. In which case, I wonder how many Aborigines who live their lives quietly each day and year and who don’t go in for the revolutionary politics of their loudly-voiced betters might be given to thinking each January 26 that whitey life isn’t too bad, that it has delivered multiple advantages to them and their clans.  Or perhaps they all really do hate their lot, blame you and me for it and will do so forever. To those I would simply say, Happy 26^th of January.

We all get to live the lives that are placed in front of us — and only those lives.  I don’t get to lament what might have been two centuries ago if only X and not Y had happened.  I don’t get to claim the mantle of group rights and stake claims against the crimes perpetrated against my Irish forebears by the awful English.  All sorts of groups have suffered injustices.  To choose randomly:

♦ The Huguenots were thoroughly done over by French Catholics.

♦ The little girls of Rotherham were groomed and raped by Muslim men while authorities turned a blind eye.

♦ English Catholics were shunned for centuries after Henry the Eighth (the other troublesome Harry).

♦ Postwar Italian migrants to Australia were called wogs.

♦ The Russian and French monarchs of the day were slaughtered by thugs proclaiming a just revolution.

♦ Europe had its Hitler and its Stalin when what it wanted was Churchill and de Gaulle. 

♦ Invaded by the Third World, Europe continues to pay for the sins of imperialist forebears.

♦ Before Constantine, Roman Christians were eaten by lions as heathens cheered.

♦ Cambodia was tormented by the combined efforts of Pol Pot, Nixon and Kissinger.

♦ The Jews have been copping it from everyone, everywhere they find themselves.

♦ Hong Kong was delivered into the hands of tyrants.

♦ Taiwan cringes in fear of a Communist invasion.

♦ The late George Pell should not have been persecuted, and certainly not convicted and incarcerated

Yes, the history of the world is one of greater and lesser unresolved injustices and of not much else.

By good fortune and a little liberalism on our part, Australia dodged much of this. Two centuries of relative peace and harmony are now up for grabs, as those with an interest in subverting our history and heritage, imperfect as it has been, set out to divide our people and destroy our culture one institution at a time. 

Half a century back, Anzac Day was under siege from the usual suspects.  Alan Seymour rote a play about it called The One Day of the Year.  That was about our warmongering.  Declared to be “over”, Anzac Day subsequently made an almighty comeback.  Will Australia Day?

AN AFTERTHOUGHT: A more unifying date for celebrating our nationhood, for both Aborigines and non-Aborigines alike, would be January 1, the day in 1901 that we became one nation.  Before that, we were a bunch of colonies.  (Some might argue, after the experience of ludicrous border closures during COVID, that we still are a bunch of colonies).  Does anyone seriously believe the Australia Day wars would end if the date were to be moved?  Angry discussion of the perceived crime of “invasion” would simply move to another day.  Whatever the date, forgiveness will never be granted by those who won’t extend it today..