Australia Day to give it its formal title, known otherwise as Invasion Day, Survival Day and a Day of Mourning to give it the most accurate reflection of what it truly is, takes place on January 26th of each year. Marking the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson in New South Wales, and the raising of the British flag at Sydney Cove by Arthur Phillip.
Governor Phillip would order in that same year the hunting down, capture and chaining in iron cuffs of the proud First Nations man, Arabanoo. His crime you wonder, there wasn’t one. Six months later he died while in the Custody of the British invaders of a disease they had brought to these lands, Smallpox.
So as well as a macabre celebration of invasion, genocide, endless massacres, vast destruction of lands and waters, rape, child kidnapping and other ghastly crimes, the annual celebration of Australia Day is also a sick, jolly carnival of flag-waving nationalism that honours the yet to cease mass imprisonment of the world’s oldest civilisation.
And you wonder why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples wish to abolish the date?
As the invaders began to travel further afield away from the harbour waters of Sydney, they would massacre, rape and torture the men, women and children of the First Nations wherever they went. But they would also imprison on a mass scale, often called for by pastoralists who had driven these people from their lands of nurture, food and water and then complained when the odd cow was taken for much-needed food. But there was a problem, Aboriginal people were skilled escape artists and thus the use of chains, leg irons and other cruel restraints that would surfice in the 19th century until the prison industrial complex could begin to take off in the 20th.
Of course, whenever a breakout was seen as “too much” or the resources lacking for even this cruel treatment, mass execution was an option that the invaders would utilise with war crime like regularity.
That constant incarceration has not stopped until this very day, in fact, it has accelerated. The prison island that the invaders created would initially hold around 1 Aboriginal person in custody for every nine settlers. That figure is now 1 in 3 for adults and 1 in 2 for Aboriginal children. So scoff at and scold the person who says Australia Day is ok, because these things are in the past. An absurd argument anyway! One that is quickly shot to pieces when it is realised that in NSW, the site of the first imprisonment, the number of Aboriginal people imprisoned has risen by 47% in just the last seven years.
As with the first Aboriginal person, many are innocent, all are prisoners of a war that has never ended, it can’t have by your own law, with a treaty yet to be signed. And deaths amongst the imprisoned Aboriginal population stain the land as they did then too, smallpox replaced by cold-blooded murder, callous disregard for human life and the nod and a wink that comes with no officer of her majesty’s crown ever having been successfully prosecuted for one of these deaths.
Royal Commissions, the insult is in the first word, have been held and then ignored. First into the neck chaining of Aboriginal prisoners for the entire length of their sentence. Something the Royal Commission in 1905 recommended against but continued well into the 1960s. And then the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) that concluded in 1991 and has been ignored entirely in the following 30 years… ensuring, deliberately, that more than 438 additional Aboriginal people would die at the hands of the police and corrective services.
Behind the bars it is no day for celebration at all; the morning sorrow breaks as the frustration builds, no family, no feet in the soil nor water, no feed, no family and no friends. The vast bulk of lawyers will be sunning themselves somewhere, so there is no chance to check on the progress of trials, parole or pardons. For the thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children on remand there is also the reminder that they are 1000% more likely to be refused bail when compared to Non-Indigenous folks.
Of course, the children ( we must wring our hands), as young as ten who are held behind bars across the country. In the NT 100% of juvenile prisoners are Aboriginal, the numbers only slightly better in other states and territories, although just as bad when you look at regional and remote communities. Here too there was a Royal Commission, a nation was “shocked” at what occurred in Don Dale, the abuse, torture and rape of children seen on our TV screens. Of course, this commission too, like the others would result in absolutely no change.
There are calls for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised in Australia from 10 to 14. So to be clear, even those on the side of progress still wish to see children imprisoned, just that they’d like it delayed for a small while. But we shouldn’t deny lofty goals some would argue, China, after all, has the age set at 14…! All of which ignores the fact that in just the last year, the imprisoning of Aboriginal kids has jumped 20%. So, raise the age if you will, they’ll still get the kids in the end and one hour spent in a cage for anyone, but especially a child, is torture.
Caged you ask, like those neck chains aren’t they gone… no, they’re just renamed as “behaviour management units” and hidden behind other acronyms like BC’s, SG’s and DIH’s - Dedicated Isolation Hubs (Kim Jong-Un wishes he thought of that one), where prisoners are regularly beaten, restrained, made compliant with chemicals and often killed. 438 in the last thirty years and the inevitability of the next, more frightening than you can imagine.
So there is nothing to celebrate about an invasion, one that marks the day the first Warden of the state, Gov. Phillip, planted the flag for King and Country. Under whose crown Men, Women, and Children of every First Nation of these lands has and have been slaughtered, raped, caged and remain today as you celebrate in cages… prisoners of a war that started on this day in 1788. Unplant that flag of Phillip, the King’s colours and ask first for forgiveness and then a way forward, it’s the only moral thing to do!
💔💔