Bronwyn and I have lived here for nearly 20 years, and we come down to this waterfront, day and night, as often as we can. It is always beautiful. Even when a nasty wind kicks up the mud in the bay, or when jet skis roar past the 4 Knot sign, or when the mozzies swarm, it’s still beautiful. Actually I take that back about the mozzies.
My favourite time is late at night, especially if you come down with dogs. The lamp on the post at the wharf sends a circle of light down onto the water. A single pelican floats into that light, looking for fish. When Polly dog was with me, she would sit and look respectfully at the pelican. Whereas those of you who know Meggsie will be able to picture the cartoon bubble above her head saying “Yeah whatever, can we go home now I’m hungry.”
We - all of us – are so lucky to be able to share this place of peace and beauty and Community. I appreciate I could just as easily have been born anywhere else in the world, or I could be living in refugee camps in Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, or PNG; or I could be bombed out of existence in Gaza or Israel, Afghanistan, Yemen, Congo, Myanmar, Ethiopia, Ukraine or Russia.
Instead, I’m here. We’re here. Here because we’ve been here for 60,000 years, or here because we took life and death decisions to be here, or because we came as convicts, or settlers, or as migrants escaping to a country that promised freedom and peace and a fair go. I’m not pretending that Australia has always delivered on those promises.
For example there are currently 1315 Asylum seekers in detention in Australia for an average detention of more than 2 years. And you’ll remember during Covid when Novak Djokovic was placed in detention for a short time before he was deported home to Serbia. It was only when that was being reported that journalists – and the Australian public – found out that in that same detention centre was a person who had been held there for nine years.
Another example: it’s only in recent generations that schoolkids have learnt anything of Aboriginal history. In my school days we could rattle off the names of the Kings and Queens of England, but we knew nothing of the 412 horrendous massacres of at least 14,000 Aboriginal people after 1788.
On the other hand, nor were we aware of the happier stories – Turo Downes, an Aboriginal man from Queensland, lived many decades in Hardys Bay where he was loved and much respected for his many skills and his gentle personality. Turo Park is named in his honour.
Also worth acknowledging is that the Human Rights Commission has named Australia as the most successful multicultural country in the world, with more than 300 nationalities living in relative harmony. I say relative harmony because, like every country, we have ratbags whose sad little lives play up to the media with ridiculous dressing-up, badly-spelled graffiti and Nazi flags.
But let’s leave them aside and come back to here, and to this day. We all know that there are legitimate objections to having a day of celebration called Australia Day on January 26, to mark when Arthur Philip planted the Union Jack flag at Sydney Cove and declared sovereignty of the country for England. But we can use this day, whenever it’s held and whatever it’s called, for coming together to be grateful for what - for the overwhelming majority of us - is our good luck, and for aspiring as a country to do better.
That requires considerable maturity, and I reckon that one sign of our increasing maturity is that our unofficial national anthem, for so long Waltzing Matilda, a tale of white men in the bush, is now being overtaken for so many of us by an inspirational and aspirational song, We Are Australian.
Helen Menzies
26 January 2024