Less and less is it being looked on a a national day of celebration - so as a PSA for our international friends, I'm just going to link quietly to this article
ETA: Also - if anyone would like to read about the historical record of settled indigenous villages with permanent housing, agriculture, aquaculture, food storage and trade, seen and reported on by the first European explorers and destroyed in the following years by the first European colonists, I really recommend Bruce Pascoe's excellent 'Dark Emu'. If you want to read it and can't get a copy, I'll happily send one as my Invasion Day gift to you. PM me
If a cheery Happy Australia Day! doesn't get the response you expected of it, it's because of this. (And if you didn't know the full history, that's okay too. We haven't talked about the frontier wars all that much - not as much as we could have done.)In the pre-dawn light, Dja Dja Wurrung man Jida Gulpilil begins to sing. He has been tending to a fire, heaping gum leaves on a mound of sandy earth, and the fire is now lit.It is time for the dawn service.This is a different kind of service for Victoria. On Anzac Day in three months, hundreds of thousands of people will gather at cenotaphs and war memorials to commemorate those Australians killed in combat. But this service is for the untold thousands killed in the business of settling Australia, who were massacred or killed in the frontier wars.Hundreds are present at the event, a mix of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people, who have come to mourn and reflect on 26 January, the 231st anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet in Port Jackson and the establishment of a British colony.
ETA: Also - if anyone would like to read about the historical record of settled indigenous villages with permanent housing, agriculture, aquaculture, food storage and trade, seen and reported on by the first European explorers and destroyed in the following years by the first European colonists, I really recommend Bruce Pascoe's excellent 'Dark Emu'. If you want to read it and can't get a copy, I'll happily send one as my Invasion Day gift to you. PM me
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