The disconnect I feel on the January 26 is not a rejection of my mother’s history. Rather, it is a rejection of the privileging of one version of history at the expense of another. I simply cannot be part of the collective amnesia that sweeps the nation on January 26 each year. – Chelsea Bond
Australia day or Invasion day? It is an actual question that every Australian must ask his or herself at some point in their lives, and typically at a relatively young age.
Australia day takes place on January 26th, and for some proud Australians it marks the founding of Australia. For other Australians, such as the author of the article Chelsea Bond, it is a day that takes place in the middle of a much longer history rather then a starting point. Bond is mixed raced; half Brittish/Irish Australian, and half Munanjahli/Australian born South-Sea Islander.
This source gives us a look at the darker side of multicultural conflicts. Instead of looking at statistics or pieces of legislation, Bond reminds us that there are still people who have to live through the poor conditions that still persist for a lot of non-White Australians while they all wait for change to occur. It also highlights an even more disturbing issue in the fact that there are thousands of people like Bond in the world today who don’t feel welcome in the country they were born in.
We remain on the margins, literally and figuratively; not worthy of the same national rituals of reverence and remembrance that our fellow Australians enjoy.
Instead of acknowledging its history of killing millions of Aboriginal people and its more recent problems concerning Immigration and Asylum policy; the Australian government responds to peaceful marches in commemoration of the dead with fences and unnecessary amounts of police officers. Of course there are moderates in Australia who neither march in defiance against Australia Day nor rally against those who do, but to some degree every Australian citizen makes some kind of decision in their mind as to whether January 26th is to be celebrated as Australia Day, or if it should be remembered as “Invasion Day” and a day when the history of the indigenous people would be dramatically altered forever.
Historians can look at Bond’s account of being an indigenous person to a land that was invaded and learn a lot about how that history is still hurting people today. Australia’s government is another example of a government to not acknowledge an obvious genocide of people it committed at some point in time. Turkey still has not yet acknowledged the genocide of the Armenians. Bond’s point of view gives historians a perspective on the racism in Australia that might otherwise never had been known. Bond lets us know there are people in 2015 who do not feel apart of the country they were born in. Its also important to note one more time, that Bond is mixed raced, but she still feels marginalized as if both her parents were Aborigine.
Dylan Brown