Today’s Saturday Tele:

LOOK HOW FAR WE’VE COME, AND CELEBRATE

Vikki Campion
18 Jan 2025

This fortnight 189 years ago naturalist Charles Darwin went to Bathurst, lamenting how “rancorously divided into parties” we Australians were “on almost every subject”.

Back then our convict beginnings were regarded by the “better classes” as social sewage. The divide did not end there. It was Protestant versus Catholic, Irish versus English, pastoralist versus Indigenous, emancipist versus free settler versus squatter.

Read diatribes of today’s modern influencers calling on followers to burn down “English” trees and Australian flags and you would think the only people who colonised this scrubby island were shipped in from Downton Abbey in cloche hats and silk gloves. The reality is that early convict settlers, as Lt. Col. David Collins described them in his Account of New South Wales, were “lean and emaciated”, dying on boats as they rowed to shore, “both the living and the dead exhibiting more horrid spectacles than had ever been witnessed in this country”.

Hardly an invading army.

The NSW Colony was 70 per cent Protestant and 25 per cent Catholic by 1891. But more than 290 different creeds called her home.

The disparate diaspora, now calling themselves Aussies, in 1891 hailed from Barbados, India, Malta, France, Russia, Siberia, Denmark, Syria, Greece, Arabia, Persia, Siam, China, Zanzibar, Brazil and Peru, each on the hope the colony would be better than where they came from.

Most of us then though were siphoned from the swamp of the UK’s criminal classes, a third of the colony unable to read or write.

Darwin saw the convicts serving free settlers. “How thoroughly odious to every feeling to be waited on by a man who perhaps was flogged from your representation the day before for some trifling misdemeanour,” he wrote.

If Darwin thought we were trouble-plagued then, imagine what he’d think of us now.

Pale women in Bondi are on Instagram mourning Invasion Day and identifying as Indigenous.

Segments of corporate Australia are encouraging employees to work on the Australia Day public holiday to be “culturally sensitive”.

Meanwhile the state government has spent Christmas madly changing regulations to racially divide us on where we can bushwalk or camp and how many fish we can catch.

Our government during Governor Macquarie’s time at least attempted to placate division, not create it.

Instead, the NSW Department of Primary Industries put a new draft regulation on public exhibition while everyone was flat out with Christmas, to “create specific cultural fishing limits which are independent of recreational fishing limits”.

Under these changes, the recreational fisher of Greek or Italian descent is limited to collect, for example, two Murray Crayfish and allowed possession of four, while the Aboriginal Cultural Fisher is entitled to four Murray Crayfish and possession of eight. Different rules for different heritages doing the same thing.

Another sneaky NSW Government move under the blur of holiday festivities was NSW Parks deciding to extend the closure of Mount Warning until 31 December 2025 “for cultural reasons,” with fines threatened to folk from the wrong heritage, or even being in the right tribe but the wrong sex.

Mount Warning, whose closure knocks out about $1 million of business for locals a year, joins Uluru, the Grampians, and, as Senator Gerard Rennick called out this week, the Arapiles in Victoria as public land paid for by Australians that Australians are banned from if they ticked the wrong heritage box on the Census.

Of course in Darwin’s day, like Indigenous Australians, the convict class were dehumanised.

Starving first fleet convicts documented: “I was chained seven weeks on my back for being out getting greens and wild herbs.”

Chained for foraging while starving. Now, with preclusions on fishing. Australia, as an experiment, of sick prison ships filled with the dying, should have been a dead letter.

That is why Australia Day is celebrating not how we began, but what we have become.

“Farewell Australia, you are a rising child, and doubtless some day will reign a great Princess in the South: but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect,” Darwin ended his diary.

“I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.”

Darwinian evolution never thought Australia would become what it has.

Lifter:

Biden and Trump who managed to find common ground to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza

Leaner:

The clique of corporates virtual signalling against Australia Day while raking in millions from people who would like to celebrate

Too many other good points to highlight.