January 26th 2025

[Roobs321]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Australian flag anywhere voluntarily in my home growing up. It isn’t an aesthetic people culturally care about. Nice to see on an official occasion, where it has its place and meaning, but it isn’t relevant, just a symbol by default. The flag itself is too boring to crossover beyond the chronic patriotic

But we do need a National day of sorts. One with less demeaning colonial connotations would help.

I recall my parents street decided to do a street party thing every Australia Day. Meet all the neighbours shindig. Not uncommon for people around the world to do this on a summer day of commemoration.

 

[peetoo]

It was significant to those who wanted to see Australia as a British colony, but don’t forget the day was held in July and August in the 1910s and 20s until the influence of NSW pushed the day to Jan 26 in commemoration of their founding. And the 1994 public holiday change.

But I’m more interested in how society viewed the day up until some years ago. My parent’s generation have told me in the 70s and 80s it was always the “January Long Weekend” and it was only after the bicentennial and Howard that the nationalistic flag waving started.



Yeah these guys were racist pricks who were the impetus behind the White Australia Policy:

Australian Natives' Association - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Basically a more polite version of the KKK. If you use them in your argument to keep the national holiday on Jan 26 then you lose

From wiki on Australian natives association. Found this interesting. assume they didn’t regard british as ‘foreign’

Views on racial bigotry and Nazism
edit
The ANA, although expressing a devout conviction for the return of the White Australia policy due to concerns for the "social impacts" of immigration,[33] has stated that "all men (even aliens) should be treated with basic dignity unless they have proven themselves worthy of something less".[34] The Association has publicly opposed the "fetishisation" and "copying" of what it considers foreign ideologies, such as Neo-Nazism:[35]
Those who carbon-copy foreign symbolism, ideology and fetishize foreign personalities above those of our own venerable history have ceased to be Nationalists. Well-intentioned racialists who have transcended nationality and ethnicity which sees a stronger connection to the Ku Klux Klan or Hitler's Third Reich than to Australia cannot be reconciled with an Australian-centric worldview. They, like many others are a product of globalisation.