If your view
of national identity is state derived, that is, you believe you can change your
national identity through changing your citizenship, and your national identity
is what your passport says it is, and being a nation is only valid in the era
of the "nation-state", then you would find it very hard to understand
why any Australian citizen would hate Australia day. It's the national day, its
a celebration of all Australians. Why would anyone be against this?
However, if your idea of national identity is defined by ethnic, cultural and
linguistic background, and derived from people who are connected by nativity
(i.e. birth and kinship) which is how the Bible defines it, and it is
understood in most of history, and what the word actually means, then Australia day is not for all people in this
country. It is something that the largely British and Irish descended
Australians can celebrate (who happen to be the majority), but it is a reminder
to many Indigenous Australians that they are no longer sovereign in their
ancestral lands.
Not all feel this way of course, and readers could easily comment here and
point out prominent examples of Indigenous Australians who love celebrating
Australia day. Readers could also talk about how British settlement improved
the land, brought Christianity with it, suppressed certain pagan practices that
weren't good, and created one of the greatest nations in the world today. I get
it, I have written about it, and know this better than most.
But I can tell you this, as the son of an Englishman, I would never celebrate
the landing of William the Conqueror at Pevensey, in the south of England. If I
was a Norman in 11th Century England or Normandy I might. It does not matter how your land is taken from you, the
result is all that matters, and people struggle with loss of national
sovereignty (by that I simply mean being ruled by your own kin ([cf. Deut.
17:15]). I understand why many Indigenous do not celebrate Australia Day.
It's not because of the left (though the left exploit it and increase the
divisions for political gain) it is because they are not sovereign in their own
land. Something the Anglo-Saxons resented for the entire existence of the
Norman dynasty which ruled them, and you can't in all honesty pretend there was some version of our modern left in Norman England.
As the son of an Englishman, I do celebrate Australia Day, because it reminds
us of the first fleet that brought the great British way of life here to
Australia. I know many people of different ethnicities who love the British
ways of common law, and liberty, and think that England created some of the
best civilisations in history. But many Anglo-Saxons did not care how the
Norman conquests lifted the standing of England in Germanic and Frankish parts
of Europe. They did not care about the European refinements to their language
and culture. They just wanted to live under Anglo-Saxon kings in England, the land of the Angles.
Before you reflexively seek to say, "Oh Matt is pushing lefty talking
points now", note this: we are the Indigenous now. Just as they lost their
land to mostly peaceful settlers moving in and making it a different place, so
too is the same thing happening to us, the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic Aussies. If you
are honest about what is happening to our way of life, you can then see it from
the Indigenous perspective more clearly.
I will be celebrating Australia day, I know people of many different national
identities who will be too, but I understand why some won't be. And it's not
always a lefty thing, people long to live free, and by free I don't mean the modern
Satano-libertarian do whatever you want degenerate pseudo-freedom. I mean free from foreign
rule. All people's long for this.
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