Australia Day ….

27/1/2015

Australia Day. What does it mean?

A public holiday is always enjoyed and for many years I never really thought about the real significance of the day. Sure there have often been celebrations, as various friends celebrate their birthdays on this date or during this long weekend.

Over recent years I have found myself reflecting more and more about what it really means. Is that a sign of age, I wonder? I have had an internal debate about the "politics and socially correct meaning" of Australia Day for some time. Invasion Day? Sorry Day? Celebration Day? What well wishes do I offer to others without offending anyone? I think I have found a response that I like. A man who I hold in enormous regard sums it up so eloquently.

Another link I came across also put a perspective that I really related to.

Nevertheless, I love being an Australian. I love the uniqueness of us Aussies. Well, most of us!!

While kick starting today with a cuppa on the back verandah with Tez, we were listening to the ABC. The Governor of South Australia was talking about when he first sighted the shores of Australia. He was a Vietnamese refugee 38 years ago, before settling in his new home - Australia.

It made me reflect about my own heritage and the runaway 18 year old Italian, that my father was. He calls Australia home, but he is Italian. He left war torn Italy to start a new life and landed in the mining fields of WA. He learnt to speak English (Australian) from the Aboriginal men. Making a life here allowed him to have a family with very different outcomes that perhaps one could imagine would have been in Italy.

Both these stories made me think of Vietnamese and Italian food, naturally! Australia truly is a multi-food/taste country and we do it so well. I believe our primary produce is of such good quality, as the soil has been nurtured for so long, with love, by the first Australians.

With acknowledgement and respect to the first Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and with well wishes to all, I hope your Australia Day 2015 has been a great day filled with good times, making wonderful memories and filled with happy tastings.

DCx

2 Comments

kim

27/1/2015 07:44:05 am

Yes Debra, Australia is a vast country, it and all of us who live upon her make the her what she is.
Every person that walks this land has a story, their story, or the story of their predecessors.
The Indigenous Peoples stories go back thousands of years, not the possible hundred that we have accrued.
It is funny, the other day i was at the NGV and looking at the Egyptian antiquities there. There was a timber barge that i remembered as a kid all, of 50 years ago, and although i had looked at these objects before, i had never read the descriptions.
The barge i think was dated 2000bc, and from there i looked at all the descriptions, the oldest some pots around 5000bc.
I sat on the seat and pondered this thought, that these were up to 7000 years old, yet our Indigenous Peoples have 40,000 year histories and the elders carry stories of changes to the country over all that time.
Australia Day, what does it mean, your link to "My Australia," has a lot to say, about our country these days.
Maybe the last line - needing a kick up the bum - sums it up almost perfectly.
I kind of feel that in the past twenty years, a certain sense of patriotism, has been fed into this, and has turned it more into "An Event," that gets bigger every year.
I can't remember as a kid, ever having Australia Day "celebration's" though i see from some history sites that there were.
I can't remember as a teenager Australia Day "events." In fact I am not sure there was even a holiday, the same in my early working years.
I kind of feel that the day has been railroaded, it has been turned into a political and marketing tool. (After all if it is a National Celebration why are shops open, are not the people working within Australians too?)
However your right, the stories of newer migration, and assimilation are all quite rewarding, our Chemist down the road, a "boat refugee" from Vietnam, came here as a boy about 12, with no family at all to help him along the road.
The kid's I went to school with, were the kid's of people like your dad.
Refugees from the Second World War, Greeks, Italian's, Egyptians, those from the Baltic States and the ones that bore much of the childish brunt, were the German kid's, who were labelled with all kind's of bad stuff.
We are a truly multi-cultural mob - it just seems a pity that we have trouble accepting that from the Indigenous we did rob, them of their country, their children, their traditions and their rights.
Sadly if there is a vote for recognition, and they are included in a hastely written constitution, then by all accounts they will loose their land's, and any rights they now have>
So maybe it shows that we are not progressing, marking time while the country gets mined, felled and sold, but not even to the highest bidder, and with no or minimal returns, to any of us that call Australia home.
kk

Deb

29/1/2015 05:57:01 am

Hey Kim, thanks for sharing your thoughts. DC

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