"Australia" Day

      Before I start, I recently made an unwitting but still casually racist mistake responding to a tweet about more women/people of colour being killed in Joker than women/POC directors nominated for best film (one each). I said Sophie didn’t get killed, but forgot about the nurse at the end. I am sorry.

      Hi guys,

      I haven’t gone to write in Parramatta Park in ages. Named after the Burramattagal people of the Darug lands, who fished for eel in the Parramatta River – hence the NRL footy (football) team, the Eels – I was driving through once and saw a person of colour, and had an unbidden, racist thought.

      These things are hell, and I fight them off; I bent this one positive and thought of this man, “You’re welcome in my country.”

      Then I stopped, and realised this isn’t my country at all. This is, was, and always will be Aboriginal land. And here I am claiming it, relatively speaking.

      Many decry the black armband view of history. These people either don’t care, or worse, celebrate the insult of colonialism. They look at January 26, Australia Day –the first day white people

moved to Sydney; the First Fleet landed in Botany Bay on the 21^st – as the day of the invasion. And yes, white people invaded.

      Sure, we have Gov. Phillip, who came to make peace, who ordered his men not to return fire when attacked by men from the Eora, who befriended Bennelong. Yes, still invasive. But not as vicious as the guy called our greatest governor, Lachlan Macquarie – he and his wife are remembered in every Lachlan, Elizabeth, and Macquarie Street in Australia.

      Let’s just say there are more injustices that need apologizing for, and a lot of streets, halls, suburbs, rivers, a shopping centre, and a regional area, that need to be renamed for what he ordered to be done to the traditional custodians – put short, wiping them out

      Yep, you heard me right. I’m pro-Change the Date, or at least change the name of the day. I want the office of Governor General to be an aboriginal office, and the aboriginal voice to parliament – in my view, the speaker of the house and senate should be an officer for the GG.

      I wear that black armband. Come at me, denialists and terra nulliusites. I won’t be standing up for an anthem about a “young and free” ex-colony when it’s actually a murderous, child-stealing icing on a 60,000 year old cake – no matter how much the words “girt by sea” resonate. But change Advance Australia Fair to one that recognizes how old this country is, and keep girt by sea, and I will.

      I guess I wanted to share that traditional custodians have been greatly harmed by white people, some of whom won’t welcome a person of colour to the countries stolen by their forebears. Traditional dance, song, art has been decried. Christiandom has gone so far as to steal kids away to raise in a “traditional” way.

      But people go on and live. The old ways are kept alive. And corroborees, smoking ceremonies, traditional stories, the forebears of modern religion, are as much a celebration of what I call God’s green earth as people who care about keeping the environment clean.

      This modern colonialism, it’s here, let’s claim it and do what we want with it, is 1788 continued. And for that I’ll wear the armband, wish for a better 26th January, and say this isn’t a good one.

      T. M.