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This might ruffle some feathers but I’m really conflicted over Australia Day, our national holiday, being on January 26th.

For those who don’t know January 26th marks the anniversary of when Governor Arthur Phillip and the first fleet of British prisoners, officers & free settlers landed on Farm Cove, Sydney in 1788. The land was labelled ‘terra nullius‘ (belonging to no one) and from that day forth was British soil until Australian Federation on January 1st, 1901 – eventually the concept of terra nullius was challenged and overturned in the Mabo case in 1992.

Now, I love my home country and appreciate just how far this place has come in the past 220+ years. And, yes if it weren’t for these initial British settlers I wouldn’t be here.

But, I can’t help but increasingly feel uncomfortable about celebrating a day when one group of people colonised the land and confined the original inhabitants initially to a life of  disease, war and cultural genocide and later to merely poverty, dislocation, prejudice and alienation which are only now just being reversed.

I don’t condone whatsoever the actions of a few yesterday in Canberra however I can definitely understand why many indigenous Australians aren’t exactly jumping to their feet to join in the celebrations of the anniversary of British settlement.

Say, for example, Russia arrived in the fledgling British colonies of Australia in the early 19th century, quickly overpowered and outnumbered the British and indigenous occupants, and set about founding a Russian colony with a firmly entrenched set of customs, laws and traditions that confided non-Russians to the margins. Fast forward to today and there’s still a British and indigenous minority who just can’t bring themselves, understandably, to celebrate the anniversary of Russian colonisation.

For this reason, I believe we need to look closer at whether the anniversary of British colonisation is really the day we want to mark as Australia’s national holiday. Surely, the day we became an independent nation is more appropriate if even it is on an unimaginative day – January 1st. And let’s change the bloody flag while we’re at it!

Interested in people’s thoughts.