Invasion Day

By 5pm it was 30 degrees in the shade. I’d already swapped the ocean for a Survival Day festival. A Survival Day festival for a cold bath and a book. And the cold bath and a book for a cold glass of water and a muesli bar. I was working myself up to putting on clothes. The house was peaceful. Newtown was peaceful. Because most people were getting pissed at the beach. I shared a beer with some friends at 6pm. And, by 8pm I was at the Opera House watching the Gob Squad’s amazing Super Night Shot. By 10.30pm I’d stacked it on my bike and ripped all the skin from the underside of my left knee. By 11.30pm I was asleep. That was my January 26 in a nut shell. It is always strange day because it is still a celebration of the colonisation of Australia by the British.

The night before, I marked Invasion Day by going to Film Fanatics at Petersham Bowling Club. And, under a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, we watched Australia Daze (1988), One People Sing Freedom (1988) and Babakiueria (1986). All three films were great in their own way. One People Sing Freedom was a short doco about Indigenous Australians who travelled to Sydney to take part in the Survival Day Protest on 26th January, 1988. Babakiueria, a film that has dated somewhat, is a mockumentary that inverts the traditional narrative of colonisation, putting white’s in black shoes. However, it is Australia Daze that I want to make comment upon here.

The idea for the doco was born in January 1987 in a pub in King’s Cross. Film maker Pat Fiske, and a man who would end up as Assistant Producer, Denis O’Rourke, were drinking beer and concocting a plan to make a film about Australia’s bicentenary celebrations. 1 year later, with the ABC as backers and $450K support, 29 film crews converged on cities and towns all over the country to film the day where Australia celebrated 200 years of white settlement. People from Sydney, Hobart, Mt Isa, and Canberra, and a selection of television footage from commercial stations that covered the celebrations feature in this extraordinary, underrated and undercirculated doco that shows a nation divided by its own historical narrative.

26 January, 1988. I was dressed as a green fairy on a Opera-House shaped parade-float, riding through the streets of Wollongong, waving to onlookers. My biggest problem on that day, as a five year old, was that I didn’t get to wear the pink fairy dress and instead was relegated to the (clearly inferior) lime green. Meanwhile in Sydney, millions of dollars of public money was spent on a dramatised re-enactment of the first fleet landing in Sydney harbour: hundreds of thousands of people came out to celebrate the event and glorify the 200 years of colonial history. But also, thousands of indigenous Australians converged on Lady Macquarie’s Chair, overlooking Sydney Harbour, to protest what the day represents and in particular the way in which it was being celebrated in 1988, and also to demand recognition for what colonisation meant and means for Indigenous people, their land and culture, past, present and future.

While the doco represents a substantial chunk of the spectrum of Australian identities, including the focus on European migrants, working class suburbanites, rural horse wranglers, the divided historical narrative between Black and White is at the heart of Australia Daze. And the film represents this divide by letting the subjects explain to camera what the day means to them. The divide comes out between the carefree attitude of wealthy white Australians who speak of the pride they feel on the day, and the resistance put up by Indigenous and non-Indigenous protesters alike who lament the lack of recognition for what the day really represents.

I spent yesterday with the film at the forefront of my mind. 22 years later and, really, little has changed. With the Northern Territory intervention continuing in spite of a national apology, with the Block in disrepair, and with the millions of people cramming onto the beach with Australian Flag temporary tattoos plastered on their face, this particular divide is still as marked as ever. I do not have anything new to add to this discussion. I guess I just wanted to note it here, for whatever minimal posterity this blog enables, and also in a belated gesture of solidarity with the protesters back in 1988. White Australia has a Black History. That history needs to be widely represented and widely understood, and more needs to be done politically to change legacy in a material sense for indigenous people living today, and all that complexity needs to be visible when we stop work to think symbolically about our Imagined Community and what it means to share this Great Southern Land.

Also, I think it might be good if ABC screened Australia Daze every year on Invasion Day.

RESOURCES:

Australia Daze : http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/australia-daze/

One People Sing Freedom: http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/one-people-sing-freedom/

Babakiueria: http://aso.gov.au/titles/shorts/babakiueria/

Film Fanatics: http://thepbc.org.au/happenings/inner-west-film-forum

Yabun Festival: http://www.gadigal.org.au/arts/arts.aspx?id=14

Before the madness by 10am the sun still hadn't burned through the morning mist over the water

"White Australia has a Black History": small banners like this one were visible around the city throughout the day. This one was up the street from the Yabun festival.