Wattle Day: A natural choice for Australia Day’s ideals of diversity and resilience
Jan 28, 2024
In 2018, I wrote about Australia Day and Wattle Day for The New Daily. While in 2024 some crazy drums still beat to PC tunes, the federal government has lowered the temperature. Soon we will be able to have a rational debate which may lead us to September 1, Wattle Day, which could become the natural and national day which we all embrace. To a historian of Australian nationalism, a painter of wattles and a seventh generation Tasmanian, it seems an inclusive solution.
A repost from Jan 25, 2018.
Australia Day was once small beer. Picnics, sandcastles and not even lamb on the barbecue.
Long ‘Anniversary Day’, it was mainly a Sydney event, only becoming a shared national public holiday in 1994. Until then it was on the nearest Monday, a ‘Happy Monday’ to go to the beach.
In 2018, it’s not so happy. Instead we have had a nasty political bullfight as different groups have used Australia Day as a weapon in battles between the Right and the politically correct.
Is there a peaceful solution to allow a celebration of national harmony instead?
I believe there is. Making Wattle Day, on the first of September, our new Australia Day.
We need a new date because three things have changed in recent years, even aside from lamb commercials..
One, increased government money supporting the National Australia Day Council.
Two, ever since the biggest jamboree in Australian history, the 1988 Bicentennial, we know that indigenous Australians view January 26 as ‘Survival Day’ or ‘Invasion Day’.
The third is part of the story of the origins of the conflicts in recent weeks. In 2017, after several local councils recognised this contradiction, aggressive groups of young men, ersatz patriots, invaded council meetings and circulated video clips on social media.
Australia Day has become the national toy of competing ideologies, particularly extreme Right carpark-size groupings with social media profiles.
We have a lot to celebrate in Australia. Once our achievements in social progress led the world, including the right to vote, the eight-hour day, pensions, factory acts, and the basic wage for a family ‘in a civilised community’. Too often we forget them as we focus on contemporary economics and on Anzac historical memory.
We need a new national day for all Australians to celebrate our achievements, and to reflect on where we can improve: ending exploited franchise labour, banks’ criminal misconduct, the epidemic of depression and the road toll.
Saying ‘No’ to January 26 is not enough.
We still aren’t doing enough to help rebuild Aboriginal society, despite real gains in life expectancy. The fatal impact of invasions erodes an indigenous culture, which becomes hard to rebuild.
However, since national days are invented traditions, there is a way to take a positive step forward – Wattle Day on September 1.
Australians still love holidays, despite our contemporary long working hours. We particularly like holidays as a break from winter cold. Two months after the now English King’s Birthday long weekend in June (Sandgropers excluded – they wait until October), many workers are crying out for a respected public holiday.
Canada chose a natural symbol, the red maple leaf, for a national flag. It suggests unity.
Our character is captured in nature by the thousand species of wattle across the whole continent. In its bright yellowness, the wattle symbolises new growth as well as diversity, spring for us and for Australia.
We need to recognise Australian achievements as well as the indigenous experience, one of the world’s oldest civilisations.
We should celebrate our heroes – artists and scientists, sports stars and ordinary people who have made a good life – and reflect on what we can do better.
Those many warming wattles, as in the song about being Australian, “We are one but we are many”, evoke our unity in diversity.
Let’s celebrate together on a new Australia Day, Wattle Day, on the first of September.
First published by The New Daily, January 25, 2018.
Adjunct Professor Stephen Alomes (RMIT University) is a social researcher investigating power and powerlessness and contemporary populism. A member of medical advisory committees, in 2020 he presented on patient empowerment at the University of Tasmania clinical reform conference. His poetry collection recording everyday experience during the pandemic, Our Pandemic Zeitgeist (Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide) appeared in late 2020. He is also the author of Australian Football The People’s Game 1958-2058, Walla Walla Press, Sydney, 2012 and The AFL and the Movement Against Racial Vilification in Gus Worby and Lester Irabinna Rigney, eds., Sharing Spaces: Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Responses to Story, Country and Policy, API Network, Perth, 2006.
‘Defining New Populisms: Causes, Characteristics and Trajectories (Australia and Beyond)’ in Ludwig Deringer and Liane Stroebel, eds., International Discourses of Populism since 2015, Routledge, 2022
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