Just one day is all most people want.
One day to celebrate Australia. One day to say, as Nino Culotta did in 1957, that we’re ‘a weird mob’, but we’re okay.
But one day, Australia Day, is too much for some to give.
The City of Greater Geelong, a council in my 79,000 km2 region of Western Victoria, has just voted unanimously to cancel Australia Day.
Citizenship ceremonies will be rescheduled. ‘First Nations’ cultural events will be held instead, including a truth-telling ceremony.
Six months of ‘community consultation’ brought about the change. But of the 282,888 people in the Geelong area, just 957 took part in the volunteer process, a whopping 0.34 per cent of the population. The Council says 447 of them were Indigenous, almost half. It represents nearly 12 per cent of the local indigenous population of 3,750.
It is an interesting statistic because it is a greater local percentage than voted for Victoria’s First People’s Assembly in 2019, the Aboriginal representative body now leading the state’s Treaty and Truth Telling processes.
In that 2019 vote, just 2,000 of 30,000 eligible votes in Victoria were cast. It is fascinating that Geelong’s Australia Day consultation managed, in one council, to bring out nearly 25 per cent of the whole-of-state vote achieved for the Assembly.
But let’s put the maths aside and return to just-one-day.
Australia Day is the only day of the year when this nation celebrates itself. It celebrates us all.
It celebrates our Indigenous history and culture. It celebrates every nationality that has come to these shores, every language spoken.
It is a day that celebrates difference – and the sheer brilliance that happens when a nation forges unity in those differences.
One day. A crucible day.
We give multiple days to acknowledging the struggles encountered in the formation of modern Australia. We have said Sorry. We have Sorry Day. We have NAIDOC Week – seven days – for the cultural celebration of our Indigenous. Another seven days are given for National Reconciliation Week.
We have above quota Indigenous representation in our Federal Parliament and how great is that? We have 3,352 registered Aboriginal corporations, 30 Land Councils, a Council of Peaks that umbrellas 70 Aboriginal Corporations, the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA), and about 40 per cent of Australia is now covered by land agreements – land titles – with Indigenous populations.
They are populations that speak the tongue of hundreds of languages – and not with one voice.
They are an extraordinary culture.
But my culture is also extraordinary. All cultures are extraordinary. Australia Day is the one day that we celebrate them all. We celebrate with unity and hope. We laugh. We throw another shrimp on the barbie.
It is a day that some places on this earth could not celebrate with such clarity. For what is a nation? For some countries, it is simply a place in time.
Europe has stories to tell of people who, having lived in one house their entire lives, have lived in different nations. A friend tells the story of a family member who came to Australia in 1947, post-war. He had been born in Fiume, northeastern Italy, which then became part of Yugoslavia and is now the city of Rijeka, Croatia. Three nations, one home. On that street, who is saying Sorry to whom?
Australia, courtesy of its faraway island status, has not suffered this multiple changes of identity or regime. But for Geelong Councillors, that is not good enough to celebrate.
In explaining the unanimous vote to cancel Australia Day, Cr Jim Mason said that the celebration made the local Indigenous ‘marginalised … sad … ignored’.
He said, ‘All of this makes January 26th a day of sorrow, a day to grieve the loss of culture, the loss of country, spiritual and physical, and the loss of family networks … that is intergenerational trauma.’
Yet, that comment ignores the same emotion felt by millions of Australians who have migrated here – and not all by choice.
What about the convicts sent to a far-flung penal colony? Or those millions of immigrants who have come here to escape war, famine, or political tyranny in their homelands? They, too, have suffered cultural loss and sadness, a longing. They no longer plough their family fields.
And what of the 1.5 million who will immigrate to Australia in the next three years? Should they feel unwelcome in their search for safe shores?
Cancelling Australia Day is code for saying we are not a good nation. We are not worth celebrating. Why would anyone want to come here to this place of trauma?
Geelong councillors would have us in a state of perpetual sorry.
They will not allow one day to reflect upon the wonderful things that have been enabled via colonisation by a democratic nation. Firstly – democracy itself – the councillors represent a tier of this.
Geelong, a fully-Labor seaside city, Victoria’s second largest, has bowed to disunity.
In cancelling Australia Day, it has given in to the oppression of identity politics, of victimhood. In so doing, it fails to applaud the successes of the Aboriginal people in this modern nation.
We are not better, or bigger, or more virtuous for giving up this one day.
And all this from a Council that clapped and cheered its crowning as one of the key host cities of the 2026 Commonwealth Games. One day, it might understand the hypocrisy.
This is, of course, a council with $150 million debt, overseen by two Municipal Monitors due to governance concerns and almost a year without a CEO. There is only one direction rates are going.
But cancelling Australia Day should fix all that.
As for a Truth Telling ceremony to replace Australia Day, I ask again, who hasn’t been telling the truth?