Many people who live in this wide brown land in the 21st century neglect so much of our history. They are inclined to forget the reason our British forebears decided to colonise this forlorn land in the first place. Londoners had run out of places to gaol our convict ancestors. The River Thames was chock-a-block with rotting hulls housing grossly over-crowded prison populations.
Donald Grump’s ancestors were being unbelievably difficult – “no taxation without representation” and so forth. So the dear sweet lords of the admiralty decided the great south land would make an excellent prison farm and frontier bulwark against the Russians, Germans, Portuguese and the French and the Dutch and all those other wogs who might want to come here.
Captain Cook had with adroit stupidity, run aground on a part of the Great Barrier Reef. By way of generously acknowledging his debt to those Aborigines who had tolerated his presence in the Endeavour River whilst he repaired his boat, Cook declared that all of the East Coast of Australia was owned by Britain. So obedient were subsequent inhabitants that even in the 1950s Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister, was not embarrassed in the least to declare himself “British to the boot heels” and in regard to the queen quoted the verse “I did but see her passing by, yet I shall love her till I die”.
When I was growing up some 60 – 70 years ago we celebrated Anzac Day. On that day in 1915, following British Army orders, we lemming-like rushed ashore to fight Johnny Turk who was dug in on the hills surrounding Anzac Cove. We celebrated Anzac Day because, as my teachers told me, that this was the day that we became a nation. I was too humble to suggest that exactly such an event may have transpired on that day in 1901 when the colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia agreed to federate as a Commonwealth. Perhaps, it was because I was a peacenik that I missed their point.
Anyway, Anzac Day has morphed into marches in the morning with grandchildren weighed down with dead relatives’ medals, piss-ups at lunch-time at RSL clubs, and wife bashing in the afternoon. In a word it’s lost its panache. There was a brief attempt to replace the celebration of Anzac Day with memories of the Kokoda Track and “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” but, despite our ingrained racism, it never quite got off the ground.
So we were forced to dig deeper into our British past, as far back as the frontier wars which whites so overwhelmingly won. We had to stop there because had we gone back any further we would have had to acknowledge those non-British explorers who had arrived on Terra Australis much earlier than the Poms. Alternatively, we would have been forced to at least pay some attention to the 70,000 years of Aboriginal ownership of this country. Neither of these options are remotely acceptable.
This is why it had to be the invasion or more correctly the arrival. The arrival was an excellent point of time to focus upon because the frontier wars in some places dragged on for a decade or more and not to put too fine a point on it the early settlers did not behave gallantly or honourably. There are too many recorded massacre sites, too many women and children slaughtered, too much poisoned flour, too many rapes and far too little acknowledgement in the Australian psyche to recognise what our predecessors did.
This is why all true Strayans want to celebrate the 26th January as the date of the founding of our nation. It is just a little unfortunate that even after 228 years we, the invaders, have not signed a treaty with Aborigines. We have been unable to come to terms with our own actions. We have failed to come to just terms with the original owners of this land. We claim this land by right of conquest and we will no doubt continue to do so until some more powerful occupier takes it from us. So please continue to celebrate Australia day on the 26th January it magnificently underlines the point that we are the interlopers.
Copyright © 2026 John Tomlinson