Happy Straya Day Cunts

[ROB]

[snaark]

I forgot all about it. What's Australia day for again?

Top one is from Bogan Hunters. Fucking funny show.

[nowonmai]

It is beyond time for Britain to apologise to Australia's Indigenous people
Paul Daley

Today is an annual festival of barbecues and slabs, and fetishisation of a flag that, with its Union Jack, symbolises violence and oppression to Indigenous people
Australian flag
‘Politics in Australia has largely failed the truth regarding British occupation of Australia.’ Photograph: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

Monday 25 January 2016 20.30 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 26 January 2016 09.58 GMT

Every year Australia Day gets bigger, more ostentatious and increasingly imbued with a brazen “kiss the flag”, “love us or leave us” territorial ugliness that eclipses a discomforting truth at the heart of our nationhood.

And that is: for the vast majority of Australians, this is someone else’s land. Always was. Always will be.

It’s inarguable.

Federal parliament might be toying with “recognising” Indigenous people in the constitution. But until that is matched by a broad apology for the violence and dispossession that accompanied British invasion and occupation, a genuine conversation about treaties with first Australians, and a formal acknowledgement of sovereignty and the need for reparations, such symbolism will remain just that – symbolic.

As non-Indigenous Australia parties with itself again today, a good place to start in terms of conciliation would be an apology from both Great Britain and Australia to this continent’s first peoples. What for? For at least a century and a half of extreme violence and continued dispossession that followed invasion, and the British-inspired wars and mass murders across the continent from the first east coast contact in 1770 to the Coniston massacre in 1928 and beyond.

There are precedents. Former British prime minister Tony Blair gave what many regarded as an apology for Britain’s role in the 19th century Irish potato famine; he later expressed profound regret (though not an abject apology) for Britain’s involvement in slavery.

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Meanwhile in 1995 Queen Elizabeth apologised to New Zealand’s biggest Maori tribe for Britain’s devastation of its lands.

It is beyond time for Britain to apologise to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The journals and letters of the British – from the first explorers and colonial governors to the soldiers and so-called “settlers” – who arrived from 1770 to massacre tens upon tens of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and steal their land, make unambiguously clear what happened.

Generations of Australian public intellectuals have wrestled with this shameful past. We’ve had the so-called “history wars” polarised between the alleged “black armband” of historical truth-telling and the “white blindfold” of adherence to some absurd notion of benign British settlement. There has been nothing resembling a national reckoning.

Former prime minister Paul Keating came closest to kick starting one with his 1992 Redfern speech:

... the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians,” he said.

It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

Tony Abbott, who promised to be a prime minister for Indigenous affairs, referenced Keating’s speech in parliament, speaking of a “stain” on Australia’s soul. And then he behaved like the paternalistic, top-down mission manager of old, conducted a cynical annual PR roadshow to a remote Indigenous community, gathered about him a self interested and blinkered cabal of Indigenous advisers and made the absurd assertion the “Great Southern Land” was “unsettled or, um, scarcely settled” before the invasion of Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet on 26 January, 1788.

That event, of course, is now marked with our annual festival of barbecues and slabs, and fetishisation of a flag that, with its Union Jack, symbolises violence and oppression to Indigenous people.

Such is the indulgence of colonial privilege.

John Howard was worse than Abbott, refusing to countenance any sort of apology because, amid all the contested past of the history wars, he thought it unnecessary for today’s Australians to feel guilt for colonialism’s back catalogue.

Malcolm Turnbull shows little early promise that Indigenous issues will be a priority.

Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister in 2008, makes a formal apology in parliament to the country’s Aborigines
In 2008 Kevin Rudd delivered what was broadly termed “the apology”. Rhetorically and legally specific, it related to the stolen generation, whose experience of being forcibly removed from parents was but one of the many terrible legacies of British invasion with its extreme violence and self-justifying social Darwinism.

Politics in Australia has largely failed the truth regarding British occupation of Australia. Perhaps mindful of potential compensation implications, consecutive recent prime ministers haven’t leveled on anything resembling the extent of the violence against Indigenous Australia and all of its dehumanising generational, social and economic reverberations.

On 30 July 1768, just before he set sail on the Endeavour in search of the “Great Southern Land”, Lieutenant James Cook received secret orders from the British Admiralty.

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Cook’s journal and the instructions (respectively manuscripts numbers 1 and 2 at the National Library of Australia, which serves a primary role in this nation’s memory) told the commander he should scour the shores for the “Products thereof” – the mammals, birds and fish, any potentially valuable minerals and decent, organic foods.

And he was “to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives, if there be any and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them ... inviting them to Traffick, and Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard.”



“You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions.”

Friendship and alliance? Civility and regard? Consent to take the land?

In Botany Bay in 1770, Cook immediately clashed with the Gweagal tribesmen, shooting at least one. He made his claims on the east coast before Phillip landed on 26 January, 1788.

Did Cook seek consent for Britain to take the land?

Did any blackfella say, “Sure, Lieutenant – Britain can have the lot”?

Think about that this Australia Day.

[ROB]

I forgot all about it. What's Australia day for again?

The day we celebrate getting rid of all the weak cunts who left.

[nowonmai]

I forgot all about it. What's Australia day for again?

The day we celebrate getting rid of all the weak cunts who left.

Funny, that's exactly how I'd put it too.

[snaark]

I forgot all about it. What's Australia day for again?

The day we celebrate getting rid of all the weak cunts who left.

I thought it was the day we celebrated getting rid of all the blackfellas.

Funny, that's exactly how I'd put it too.

At least I went somewhere. Everyone should be a migrant once in their life. It makes you slightly less of a moron.

[nowonmai]

I forgot all about it. What's Australia day for again?

The day we celebrate getting rid of all the weak cunts who left.

I thought it was the day we celebrated getting rid of all the blackfellas.

Funny, that's exactly how I'd put it too.

At least I went somewhere. Everyone should be a migrant once in their life. It makes you slightly less of a moron.

The jury is out in your case.

[coldharvest]

Everyone should be a migrant once in their life. It makes you slightly less of a moron.

Perhaps it makes one less ignorant but I doubt it bestows extra IQ points.

[snaark]

Everyone should be a migrant once in their life. It makes you slightly less of a moron.

Perhaps it makes one less ignorant but I doubt it bestows extra IQ points.

Point taken.

[nowonmai]

Everyone should be a migrant once in their life. It makes you slightly less of a moron.

Perhaps it makes one less ignorant but I doubt it bestows extra IQ points.

Point taken.

When are you going to migrate back to that colony? I bet they're missing you.