His language was of a knockabout kind. Its hard not to wonder whether this habit is seasonal. The summer seems to bring out the most casual side of the man who doesnt hold a hose, mate.
Not particularly flash: its the kind of thing you might say if you ate a dodgy prawn at a barbecue lunch.
Strictly speaking, Morrison isnt really right, even on this score. After a voyage lasting more than eight months, most convicts will have been pleased to arrive at their destination. Unlike the death ships of the Second Fleet, the First Fleet was a meticulously planned and largely successful voyage. Even then, it killed 48. It wasnt Fairstar the Funship.
If Morrison is arguing that the life of a convict wasnt all that much fun, its hard to disagree. The convicts of the First Fleet faced a life of exile, with low prospects of ever going home. They had to work hard. There were food shortages. They were subject to the threat of the lash. They were not without rights, but it was a society with coercion at its heart.
The context for Morrisons not-so-flash-day remark was the pain that Australia Day causes many Indigenous people. By drawing attention to convicts, he was not engaging in an impartial reading of Australias early colonial history. He was engaged in the political exercise of playing down one peoples suffering by drawing attention to the sufferings of others.
Not just any old others, either. Morrison is a white Australian and descendant of convicts. He was drawing attention to the oppressions endured by his own people, thereby reminding us that white lives matter, too. And through such comparison, he was necessarily diverting attention from the sufferings of Indigenous people, which are at the heart of criticisms of Australia Day.
This is a common rhetorical device among right-wing politicians and historians. When faced with the destruction that the British arrival wrought on Aboriginal people, there are some common patterns of response. One is to adopt a faux objective birds eye view of the historical accountant, busily engaged in filling out a balance sheet of ones own devising. Most indigenous people are better off than if they had remained, generation after generation, in their old way of life, historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote in The Australian.
But another response is to argue that while things were bad for Aboriginal people, the whites had it bad, too. Ann Curthoys, another historian, has shown how this deeply entrenched idea casts white Australians as victims, struggling heroically against adversity. Were all little Aussie battlers. And convicts, as the original little Aussie battlers, have a foundational role to play in this national story.
Australia Day is one of the occasions Anzac Day another on which this image of Australians is celebrated. On the occasion of the First Fleet centenary, TheBulletin dismissed January 26 as the day we were lagged. It wanted to celebrate December 3, the anniversary of the Eureka uprising, rather than an anniversary that drew attention to ignoble convict origins.
But that idea never took off. We should be wary of arguments that make the case for celebrating on some day such as the anniversary of Federation, New Years Day that means nothing to most Australians. Civic occasions do need to have some popular resonance.
But do they need to be expressions of a compulsory national consensus? I dont think so. Morrison believes Australia Day is about how far weve come together since that day. But who are the we here? This idea of past, present and future generations as travellers on a national journey but unlike that of the First Fleet, toward some unspecified destination is a hackneyed one and wed do well to throw it overboard.
Australia is happily still a democracy, and the contention around January 26 which wont be going away any time soon might be treated as evidence of its continuing vigour. The Change the Day debate is already shifting how many Australians, especially younger ones, observe the day. Thats how democracy should work.
The time might come when the day is no longer observed at all, although I think that unlikely for many years. In the meantime, we are a better society and better democracy for having a national day of contention rather than of unity. Long may that last.
Frank Bongiorno AM is Professor of History at the Australian National University.
