BOTW: Warriors of woke, or carving out a brand position?

Great post Tim, what a grand way to end the year.

I concur with your melancholy regarding the Palawa, and a thought promoting post regarding as to what ‘Australia Day’ stands for.

Gazetting it on the bi-centenary of the First Fleet landing to establish the British Colony of New South Wales (as a penal colony following the loss of the 13 colonies in what is now the USA) was probably Bob Hawke’s biggest error in being a populist. There was no ‘Australia’ on January 26, 1788.

It wasn’t until 1804 that Matthew Flinders suggested the name ‘Australia’ following his circumnavigation of the continent we now call Australia. It was derived from the Latin for ‘Southern Land’ – Terra Australis. There is no date on the reproduction of Flinders hand-drawn map held in the National Library. [What if Flinders named it after his cat and we celebrated the cat’s birth?] It wasn’t until 1817 that ‘Australia’ officially replaced ‘New Holland’.

It then wasn’t until January 1, 1901 that the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed by the Governor-General Lord Hopetoun.

Clearly the basis of calling it ‘Australia Day’ is a pretty rocky, inaccurate date. And for the indigenous the landing on January 26 it is seen as an ‘invasion’ to set up a penal colony. Many of the convicts were pardoned after 7 years – free, could work, and could own land (and often the land was a grant). A better deal than the indigenous.

But I do support an Australia Day as a national celebration – but not January 26. For the past two hundred plus years our heritage is primarily (but far from exclusively) of British origin. And it was Lieutenant James Cook who was the first English person to set foot on what we now call Australia on April 29, 1770. Cook, overall, was not seen as an invader or dangerous enemy of the indigenous according to the historians, despite use of rifles and collecting artefacts.

So wouldn’t April 29 make a much better ‘Australia Day’?