On Australia Day

(Warning: this is long. It’s intended primarily as reportage rather than opinion.)

THE WEATHER on Australia Day is most un-Australian. Cool and overcast, it’s more reminiscent of the soggy island whence this continent’s first European immigrants sailed. Still, it’s a welcome change from the heat wave that has baked New South Wales for more than a week; two days before, the mercury breached 40 degrees, the second hottest January day since 1980.

Australia Day is a celebration of the arrival of the First Fleet in Port Jackson, in what would become Sydney Harbour. The Australian of the Year, Professor Mick Dodson, has called for the date to be changed to something more inclusive: February 13, the day on which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said sorry. Australia’s Aboriginal community knows Australia Day as Invasion Day, or Mourning Day.

To most of the people I see on the ferry, at Circular Quay and in Hyde Park, Australia Day appears to be an excuse to enjoy a day off outdoors with the family, flag-waving optional. No sweating for hours in a stadium listening to some self-important political prat droning on about the stakeholders and the people and the revolution. Hallelujah.

Despite the English weather — Australians are almost as patriotically obsessed with their sunny weather as South Africans — and choppy, grey waters, the harbour boils with boating activity. The skies are filled with the thwokkathwokkathwokka of helicopters, a sound that reminds me, above all, of the Pope. (The last time I saw a black chopper circling ahead of a flotilla of yachts – its purpose was unclear; I wondered if it was occupied by snipers looking for anyone likely to cause trouble – was when Pope Benedict XVI visited Sydney for World Youth Day.)

Circular Quay is full of good-natured crowds keen to see the finish of the traditional ferry race. I amble around to the botanical gardens to see if anything interesting is happening there; ahead of me, an athletic-looking middle-aged couple stride along in jogging gear; between them, their lanky son, wearing a South Africa cricket shirt, waves an Australian flag.

On the steps in front of the Opera House, a rowdy group of children and teens poses in ostentatiously patriotic outfits. “Aussie Aussie Aussie!” the woman with the camera yells when everybody is ready. Her voice has been gravelled by God knows how many years of how many cigarettes. “ Bogans of the world unite.” One of the boys spots a stranger photographing them. “Oi, that’s foive dollars mate!” he calls, and everybody laughs.

The racing ferries pass under the bridge in the distance. “Best harbour in the world,” the woman next to me says to her companion. Behind me, the ice cream vendor, a middle-aged Anglo, practises the salsa with one of his cashiers, a young woman with what sounds like a Brazilian accent.

I catch a bus up to Hyde Park, where four entertainment sections have been organised. Alvin and the Chipmunks are singing for the younger children — the performers must be sweating inside those suits — while for aspiring rock stars there’s the Guitar Hero World Tour stage. For everybody else, there’s a choice between the Great Aussie Barbecue Stage and a 1960s cover rock band or the Classic FM stage. I opt for the latter, buying a cheese and fruit platter for lunch along with a plastic glass of Semillon Sauvignon Blanc for lunch. No more than four alcoholic drinks per person, warns the sign at the food tent. I sit in a corner and saw away with a plastic knife at a triangle of Brie while the disembodied voices of a man and a woman float over the PA system. She’s talking about her experiences as an Aboriginal woman and her thoughts on Australia Day. Her message to everybody is, “Acknowledge the history of this country and accept it”.

The first news headlines are announced — the Dodson story about the call to change the date of Australia Day — before the sound of the broadcast is muted to allow an a capella group to sing Waltzing Matilda. It’s a strange confluence of different notions of what constitutes Australianess. On the stage is a piece of cardboard on which both the Australian and the Aboriginal flags have been painted; one of the singers flaps it so that it produces a sound, like a musical instrument.

The group sings a rude song about cows and farting — “You’re the Friesian heifer in the cow-yard of my heart” — before moving onto “Tie me kangaroo down sport”. I remember this one well from my days in the Bryanston Primary choir, so I sing along. (They leave out the racist verse about “Let me Abos go loose, Lou”.)

I move off, passing by an exhibition of E-Type Jaguars and old Sydney buses (it seems that, just as there are train spotters, there are bus spotters too) as I wait for the one event I am keen to see. This is the official citizenship ceremony presided over by the Lord Mayor of Sydney. Eighteen people from Argentina, Ireland, the UK, the US, Cambodia, South Korea, China, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Bosnia-Herzegovina are to become Australian citizens. “I bet about three of those people speak English,” says a woman standing nearby.

Before the ceremony starts, indigenous protocol is followed with a “welcome to country” ceremony. Two men in traditional dress appear on stage; one playing the didgeridoo, one singing. He reminds the audience that Aboriginal Australians have only been citizens for 41 years, “despite occupying the land for 40 000 years”. “That’s all I have to say,” he adds.

After the “welcome to country” ceremony, the mayor — or “mare”, as the Australians pronounce the word — gives a short speech about the importance of forging bonds with indigenous Australians, the commitment to reconciliation and the importance of living in harmony with the land. Australia was not a melting pot, she says, as this would make everything terribly bland. But it is important to remember Australia’s core values: freedom, diversity and tolerance. With rights come responsibilities, she says. “Yeah,” says the woman behind me. Perhaps she voted for Pauline Hanson, the Julius Malema of Australian politics in the 1990s.

The prospective citizens take the oath “From this time forward under God”, which seems weirdly out of kilter with a country notoriously averse to church going. The participants repeat the oath and receive their certificates. There’s a huge range of people here, from the Bosnian woman who composed some of the music for “Australia” to a Cambodian man who grew up in New Zealand (presumably his English isn’t a problem), to a pair of brothers who look like gangsters out of an Al Capone biopic but actually run their own law firm. After the certificates are handed out, a singer appears to lead the crowd in the national anthem. You can tell I’m not a sports’ fan, because this is the first time I have ever heard “Advance Australia Fair” in full. Very few in the crowd sing along; Australians on the whole seem keen on patriotism (far more so than the British, though less so than the Americans) but perhaps this is asking too much.

Before leaving Hyde Park, I pass the Classic FM section again, pausing to listen to a poetry recital. The poet fought in the Anglo-Boer War, explains the MC, and the poem is about how the smell of the wattle in the rain at Lichtenberg reminds him of home. Can you guess who the poet is? asks the MC, but he does not enlighten us. (It turns out to be Rudyard Kipling.)

On the way back to the ferry, I am persuaded by the half-price entry offer to explore the Hyde Park Barracks museum. One section focuses on the shipping of Irish orphan girls to New South Wales between 1848 and 1853. Rendered destitute by the potato famine, they were brought out to provide servants, wives and mothers for the colony. Some of them toiled as servants, some married and had vast numbers of children; others ended up back in the Barracks years later when the top floor became a home for destitute women. The display case in the centre includes replicas of the simple white bags in which they carried their worldly possessions.

I hitch up my own bag, irritable that my back is aching again (backache involves visits to the Chinese masseurs around the city, and that can get expensive very quickly). Macquarie Street is lined with vintage cars, many of them displaying signs asking members of the public to look and admire, but not touch (the public routinely ignores them and lean against the bodywork to pose for pictures anyway). There are Mustangs, a Shelby Cobra, more Holdens, Renaults, and two Maserati Khamsins with weird see-through boots. Australia is evidently a nation of car-lovers.

Later, as the ferry chugs into Mossman Bay, the sky sinks low and drizzle sets in. The evening news features Kevin Rudd saying a “simple, respectful, straightforward” — a very slight, but telling pause — “no” to the call to change the date of Australia Day. There is footage of chanting marchers protesting against Invasion Day and news of Australians honoured as Members of the Order of Australia. One, an actor, says that he hopes that there will be more reflection on a day “swamped in sentiment and self-congratulation”.

I page once more through the weekend’s papers. “We’ve said sorry, but is this enough? Do we mean it? Our Australia Day off should be not just a barbecue, bronzed, beach ball focused lifestyle of thongs and things,” reads one letter to the Sunday Telegraph. “No, we must accept that this vast, café latte-coloured landscape doesn’t belong to us. We belong to it. We must share, cherish and nurture it if we are to survive together in it.”