If you ask me, the phrase Happy Australia Day is a perfectly legitimate and welcome greeting. Indeed, it is a desirable greeting that should be encouraged and not disparaged. Australia Day is a celebration of everything that the great nation, of Australia, has become. Australia Day is a celebration for all Australians of all ethnic backgrounds, irrespective of whether they are of European, Asian, African, Middle Eastern or INDIGENOUS origins.
I realise that Australia is not perfect; indeed it would be impossible for any nation to be so. However, compared to the majority of nations, around the world, Australia is a shining light of freedoms, rights, prosperity and peace. Anyone who has travelled the world, with their eyes wide open, will know this. Anyone who watches the nightly news, and sees past the media propaganda, will also know this.
Unfortunately, there are those people, enjoying the rights, freedoms and protection of being Australian, who have lost sight of the truth, and who are ignorant of world history or truly understand what much of the world is like today. These people have been blinded by the disease of political correctness and by the desire to be seen as ‘trendy’; supporting causes that have been manufactured to destroy and not to correct. For that is what the anti-Australia day movement is really about; not uniting, not correcting but destroying.
We cannot change history and we cannot change what our ancestors, both white and black, did. The simple fact is that, two to three hundred years ago, Europeans expanded their presence around the globe and altered world history for ever. However, is this so different to what has occurred throughout known history?
Let’s look at just a couple, of the many, examples from history. By the seventh century, Arab Muslim forces had invaded and occupied much of the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, including much of what had once been the Roman, Mesopotamian, Persian and Egyptian empires. By the 16th Century, they had invaded and subjugated much of India and this was characterised by the worst cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide the world has ever seen . Today, many lands that had once been Christian or Pagan, are now Muslim and this was completed at the point of a sword. Hundreds of years ago, and maybe as late as the 16th Century, the Bantu tribes of Africa migrated south, through the African continent and displaced other, more ancient people, such as the San. Ten to twenty thousand years ago, the ancestors of the American Indians migrated across the Bering Strait to occupy North and South America. There is even some archaeological evidence suggesting that other early humans may have predated the Australian Aborigines on the Australian continent. History is full of mass migrations, colonisations and even invasions.
Indeed, if you look throughout history, and try and find any nation, today, that is occupied and controlled by the original inhabitants, whether as a majority or even a minority, and you will be hard pressed to find many. Of the 195 countries, in the world today, the number that are inhabited, and governed, by the original inhabitants can probably be counted on one hand.
There are lots of events, throughout world history, that are regrettable or, in hindsight, should not have occurred, but we cannot re-write history; we can only learn from history. One clear lesson, from world history, is that when political or ethnic groups try and exploit situations for their own goals, when divisive and discordant views attempt to correct perceived wrongs, when the general good of the whole population is sacrificed to placate minority interests, then the results are usually disharmony, the erosion of national unity and even conflict and war.
The Invasion Day and Sorrow Day movements cannot correct history but they can, and will, negatively affect the future for all Australians, including Aboriginal Australians. It is time to wake up, stop the politically correct BS and get on with making Australia even greater for ALL Australians, and that includes indigenous Australians. We can move forward, together, towards a brighter future. Or we can stand here, argue and fight, ridicule and blame, and slowly, but surely, destroy all hopes of that brighter future.
We should be one people, under one flag, with one constitution, one set of laws, one set of rights and we should all be equal and supportive. We can move forward, into that future, together or we can squander it by arguing about a history that cannot be changed. It is time to wake up and ditch the divisive, Invasion Day rhetoric for good.
Happy Australia day to all.
Copyright © Robert Pretty 2019.
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