January 26 is not the anniversary of Cook's arrival in Australia.

[spacesailor]

As we seem to be quasi American,

Lets have " Thanks Giving Day ".

No idea what it,s for, but it sounds good, like the other celibrations, we enjoy from those Americans.

Another "  burn the witches  day "!. 

spacesailor

[red750]

You could make it February 31st and they still wouldn't be happy.

[old man emu]

22 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

Can't be hemp string. Hemp's banned in Australia

No it's not.

https://www.odc.gov.au/hemp-products

[Bruce Tuncks]

Yep space, back in the olden days they used to burn witches out of ignorance and wickedness. Babysitting was quite dangerous because if the baby later died, you could be blamed.

I don't feel any guilt for those witch-burnings. Nor do I feel any guilt about aborigines. The bad things happened long before I had any say.

By the time I had any say, the boot was on the other foot and these days you get on better if you can claim any aboriginality. Not that I had any say in that either.

If I had my way, we would become a republic and have an entirely new day to celebrate that. But we had a vote and my lot lost.

[pmccarthy]

The big day was once May 24th. Empire day became Commonwealth day, the date was originally Queen Victoria's birthday. We had patriotic songs and cracker night. It was the big day of the year for us kids. Certainly the school made it seem that way too.

[old man emu]

17 hours ago, willedoo said:

I couldn't see Aboriginal people showing much bipartisan support for that

And that seems to be the whole problem. Through the Federal Government, Aboriginals have been given an apology for what in the 21st Century are seen as wrongs committed through misguided thinking. It's true that Aboriginals still are getting benefits that are based on the misguided belief that if enough money is thrown at problems, they go away. As I have said repeatedly, until anthropologists have come to fully understand the Aboriginal way of thinking as it applies to temporal and spiritual matters in order to advise Non-Aboriginals,  Aboriginals and Non-Aboriginals will not be able to come together to develop the ways and means to achieve equality. Once again, the stumbling block is the failure to recognise that Aboriginals are not a single politico-cultural unit. There are maps for everyone to see that show the "national" politico-cultural boundaries of the Aboriginal people. Basically any effort towards equality requires the solution of unique conditions in each of those "nations". 

 

However, since many Aboriginal people have swallowed this propaganda about a cruel "invasion", and reject the apology offered for past wrongs, there is little hope of a solution. Meanwhile, Aborigines are quite happy to take the Good in terms of financially based assistance and discriminatory advantages given them. One could suggest that Aboriginals are racists, but that would be a PC no-no.  

 

 

[red750]

They keep talking about the 'first nation' people. There was no 'first nation'. There were a number of disparate, warring tribes, who happened to share the same piece of land surrounded by ocean.

[old man emu]

14 minutes ago, red750 said:

There was no 'first nation'. There were a number of disparate, warring tribes, who happened to share the same piece of land surrounded by ocean

"First People" would be a more correct term.

Is it true that the tribes were "warring"? That implies that the various tribes were not able to settle country boundaries amongst themselves over the 12500 years since the end of the last global Ice Age. I find that very hard to accept. If warring was common, how did the transcontinental trade routes develop? Or was it the goods that moved, and not the carriers of the goods.

 

This link https://austhrutime.com/feud_and_warfare.htm discusses warring in the last areas of Australia to be settled by Whites. I wonder what happened in the first areas to be settled.

[Yenn]

It is true that the tribes were warring. Cape York aboriginals were raided by the Islanders regularly until well after the white man came here. Aboriginals had war clubs and shields so I would assume they were used sometimes.

It is not true that the present aboriginals were part of the first inhabitants of Australia. They do not know the history of the Bradshaw artwork, which pre dates their own.

I really want to know what the aboriginals want from us. Some say they should be recognized in the constitution, but what would that do?

It is obvious that there were atrocities committed against them in the early days, but we are not responsible for that and there is only so much apologising we can do. Later wrongs were the stolen generation, which was done with good intentions to try to better their lot.

What gets forgotten is that wherever you live in the world you are very unlikely to be related to the original inhabitants. Your country has been fought over, time and time again. Even in long established countries your forbears probably came from somewhere else.

[pmccarthy]

Much of the symbolism in the Bradshaw art can be related to the highlands people of New Guinea, at least to a common origin. The two lands were connected.

[onetrack]

I've just about had a gutful of the whinging and wailing about "Invasion Day" and "Massacre Day" and whatever else the Aborigines choose as a name for their so-called destruction as a "cultural entity". It fills just about every news page.

 

One: They haven't been destroyed as a cultural entity. Their numbers have thrived since the White Man landed here. If there's any area where they're not thriving, it's because of alcohol abuse, crime, violence, and domestic and sexual abuse.

 

None of that is the White Mans fault. It's called taking some responsibility for your own behaviour.

 

Two: The Aborigines are better fed, better clothed, and better rewarded, than nearly any other tribal entity around the world. They may have major health problems, but a large part of that is their poor choice of diet, and a lack of hygiene.

 

They have access to plenty of healthcare, for free - and they get special Aboriginal health programmes targetted at them. There's little reason they shouldn't be as healthy as whites.

 

Three: If Australia had been taken over by the Spanish, the French, or any one of a dozen other nations that thought about taking over Australia - the Aborigines would really have something to complain about - as those other nations have a record of massacring tribal inhabitants wholesale, in many of the countries they took over. They would've virtually ceased to exist as a cultural entity, under any of those other nations.

[old man emu]

I wonder how some of these Aboriginal activists who cry "poor bugger me" would go if you gave them a six month's holiday in Kosciusko, Mississippi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosciusko,_Mississippi and see what cultural mistreatment is really like.

 

 

 

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

Those aborigines who really know say they are much better off these days than before whites arrived.  Before whites, their lives were very short and filled with pain and suffering.

It is white ( some legally but not actually aboriginal ) activists who are seeing a possibility of gaining influence by pushing this nonsense about invasion day etc. I sure have been confused by how some clearly white people get to be legal aborigines and then cash in on the services provided.

 

The worst thing about the arrival of whites was that they brought smallpox with them. Since this happened lifetimes before the discovery of germs, it is unfair to blame the first fleeters for this.

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

And they certainly consisted of warring tribes. Yes there was a bit of trade, and women were raped by adjacent tribesmen, which fact would have helped prevent inbreeding. ( when a group bumped into a superior group from another tribe , they would herd their women over. If the women were just raped, all was well.)

An interesting story from Stuart's expeditions was that aborigines in the top end referred to his guns as "musquats". So there was a diffusion of knowledge from the muskets of the first fleet , over nearly a hundred years.  Guns had advanced in the meantime and the word was no longer in use among whites.

[old man emu]

41 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

The worst thing about the arrival of whites was that they brought smallpox with them, it is unfair to blame the first fleeters for this.

Actually, although there was an epidemic of a "pox" throughout the aborigines around Port Jackson in 1789, it was probably not Smallpox, but the lesser dangerous Chicken Pox. Epidemiologists have described the behavior of at least the first of these "smallpox" epidemics as far more typical of the closely related but (to Europeans though not to Aborigines) less deadly chickenpox, which was certainly present in the settlement. Thus Professor John Carmody, after pointing out that none of the European colonists were threatened by it, remarked: “If it had really been smallpox, I would have expected about 50 cases amongst the colonists.”

 

In 1914, Dr J. H. L. Cumpston, director of the Australian Quarantine Service tentatively put forward the hypothesis that smallpox arrived with British settlers. Cumpston's theory was most forcefully reiterated by the economic historian Noel Butlin, in his book Our Original Aggression (1983). Likewise David Day, in Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia (2001), suggested that members of Sydney's garrison of Royal Marines may have attempted to use smallpox as a biological weapon in 1789.

 

However, in 2002, historian John Connor stated that Day's theory was "unsustainable".That same year, theories that smallpox was introduced with settlers, deliberately or otherwise, were contested in a full-length book by historian Judy Campbell: Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780-1880 (2002). Campbell argued that scientific evidence concerning the viability of variolous matter (used for inoculation) did not support the possibility of the disease being brought to Australia on the long voyage from Europe. Campbell also noted that there was no evidence of Aborigines ever having been exposed to the variolous matter, merely speculation that they may have been.

 

Later authors, such as Christopher Warren, and Craig Mear continued to argue that smallpox emanated from the importation of variolous matter on the First Fleet. Warren (2007) suggested that Campbell had erred in assuming that high temperatures would have sterilised the British supply of smallpox. H. A. Willis (2010), in a survey of the literature discussed above, endorsed Campbell's argument. In response, Warren (2011) suggested that Willis had not taken into account research on how heat affects the smallpox virus, cited by the WHO. Willis (2011) replied that his position was supported by a closer reading of Frank Fenner’s report to the WHO (1988) and invited readers to consult that report online. Campbell consulted, during the writing of her book, Frank Fenner, who had overseen the final stages of a successful campaign by the World Health Organization (WHO) to eradicate smallpox.

[old man emu]

Just an observation, but how many of us knew of the existence of the 1986 Act? Today is the first time I have heard of it, despite living under its effects for over 35 years.

 

The question of what event should we use for our celebration of being a Nation is still to be resolved. Clearly, and through no fault of theirs, the various First Nations cannot point to an event that could be used. 250 separate "nations" can't possible relate to the same event, not even in the present time. If there really was one event that created Australia it was the coming into effect of the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 1900 (Great Britain) on 1st January 1901. But that date is otherwise taken up around the world.

 

The Proclamation of the Colony on 26th January, 1788 is a date recorded in History. It is a useful day on which to have some sort of celebrations as it also marks the end of the summer Silly Season and a return to a workaday life for most. For about 240-odd First Nations, it didn't have much effect until at least 1800.

 

25th April is important for more sombre  reasons, and can't be turned into something else. Empire, later Commonwealth Day, has been abandoned, and although we still involve ourselves in the Commonwealth of Nations, it is not really centred on our being an independent nation. The Labour Day (8 hour Day) isn't observed on the same day across the Nation. Ironically, perhaps we should celebrate the day on which retailers were allowed to trade 24/7.

 

So, for want of a better alternative, it looks like the 26th January will have to do until, or if, we can resolve the Head of State matter in order to declare Australia free of any and all constraints on our governance.  

[Jerry_Atrick]

Where did the post go on the concise history if Australia? I wasn't going to argue the facts per se, but I do take umbrage at the assertion that Australia was not independent until the Australia act in 1986, It removed the last vestiges of direct British influence on Australia. The two most notable was that the monarch was officially titled the monarch of Australia and the choice of appealing a case to either the Appeals Division/Bench of the High Court of Australia or the Privy Council of the House of lords  was removed, and the High Court of Australia was the only path of appeal. And from memory (I studied constitutional law about 25 years ago now), it wasn't an automatic right to appeal to the Privy Council  - certain criteria had to be met, albeit, that was set by the Privy Council.. so could in theory be changed by them. ISTR  some of the conditions included being of constitutional  importance in the relationship with the crown.. but may be wrong on that.

 

Far more important were the Statute of Westminster (1931) and I think ti was the Adoption Act (1942), both of which culminated in the granting of autonomous powers to the colonies and Australia. The vestiges that were left were the above.. and some minor administrative Importantly, Westminster could no longer make laws or impose obligations on Australia, I am guessing with the exception that Australian cases taken to the Privy council would be binding in Australian law, although it would be interesting to see if it was in the appeals division/bench of the high court. I am not sure that has ever been tested.

 

So, yes, in theory, it was not until 1986 that Australia became legally totally independent, like the fact the monarch is the tenant in chief of the UK, and technically still owns the UK, practically that is not the case, and there is a groundswell of legal opinion that as such, the monarch no longer owns all the property through possesory rights. It can be argued that Australia was independent and although there was a smidge of influence, Britain lost all real control through the passage of time.

 

Be interesting to see what happens if the UK parliament repeals these acts.. Under the UK's unwritten constitution, no parliament can bind its successors, so regardless of whether or not there is a section that stops the act from being repealed, parliament can repeal them

[old man emu]

On 25/01/2023 at 10:22 AM, Jerry_Atrick said:

if the UK parliament repeals these acts..

Jerry, which Acts?

 

Preamble to the Australia Act 1986.

WHEREAS the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth and the Premiers of the States at conferences held in Canberra on 24 and 25 June 1982 and 21 June 1984 agreed on the taking of certain measures to bring constitutional arrangements affecting the Commonwealth and the States into conformity with the status of the Commonwealth of Australia as a sovereign, independent and federal nation: AND WHEREAS in pursuance of paragraph 51 (xxxviii) of the Constitution the Parliaments of all the States have requested the Parliament of the Commonwealth to enact an Act in the terms of this Act:

 

BE IT THEREFORE ENACTED by the Queen, and the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia, as follows:

 

Short title and commencement 17.  (1)  This Act may be cited as the Australia Act 1986.      (2) This Act shall come into operation on a day and at a time to be fixed by Proclamation.

 

Her Majesty the Queen on 2nd March 1986 signed the Proclamation to bring the Australia Act 1986 into operation. The Act commenced at 4.00 pm, Eastern Summer Time, on 3rd March 1988, simultaneously with the Australia Act 1986 which was enacted by the United Kingdom Parliament at the request of the Commonwealth Parliament and all the State Parliaments. 

[spacesailor]

SO

3 rd March ! .

Australia day

I don't mind that day .

spacesailor

[red750]

July is the one month in the year in which there are no public holidays in any state. (Accordining to the calendar on my iPhone.)

[Jerry_Atrick]

5 hours ago, old man emu said:

Jerry, which Acts?

 

Preamble to the Australia Act 1986.

WHEREAS the Prime Minister of the Commonwealth and the Premiers of the States at conferences held in Canberra on 24 and 25 June 1982 and 21 June 1984 agreed on the taking of certain measures to bring constitutional arrangements affecting the Commonwealth and the States into conformity with the status of the Commonwealth of Australia as a sovereign, independent and federal nation: AND WHEREAS in pursuance of paragraph 51 (xxxviii) of the Constitution the Parliaments of all the States have requested the Parliament of the Commonwealth to enact an Act in the terms of this Act:

 

BE IT THEREFORE ENACTED by the Queen, and the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia, as follows:

 

Short title and commencement 17.  (1)  This Act may be cited as the Australia Act 1986.      (2) This Act shall come into operation on a day and at a time to be fixed by Proclamation.

 

Her Majesty the Queen on 2nd March 1986 signed the Proclamation to bring the Australia Act 1986 into operation. The Act commenced at 4.00 pm, Eastern Summer Time, on 3rd March 1988, simultaneously with the Australia Act 1986 which was enacted by the United Kingdom Parliament at the request of the Commonwealth Parliament and all the State Parliaments. 

This one: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/2 and the statute of Westminster and the Adoption Acts - all of which are Westminster acts

Australia Act 1986
1986 CHAPTER 2

An Act to give effect to a request by the Parliament and Government of the Commonwealth of Australia.

[17th February 1986]

Whereas the Parliament and Government of the Commonwealth of Australia have, with the concurrence of the States of Australia, requested and consented to the enactment of an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the terms hereinafter set forth:

 

Both the UK and Australian Australian Acts were passed at, as I recall, virtually the same time, to give effect to the referendum. Note, it does not grant Australia independence; only that the UK will not be able to make laws for it. Therefore, in theory, the UK Act can be repealed at any time.

 

Of course, Australia couldn't give a stuff if they did. But it is an interesting legal question that, since both acts needed to be simultaneously passed, what happens if the UK repeals theirs from a legal perspective?

 

 

Edited January 28, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[Marty_d]

Why do we have to name public holidays?  Can't we just have one in the first Friday of every month?

[Jerry_Atrick]

We can change our names to numbers? The point of most public holidays is to celebrate something, is it not?

[old man emu]

1 hour ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

Both the UK and Australian Australian Acts were passed at, as I recall, virtually the same time, to give effect to the referendum.

Two points.

1. The British Parliament had to give up its powers to make laws applying to Australia, and Australia had to formally say that no British law affecting Australia was enforceable in Australia.

 

2. The Queen gave her assent to the separate Acts at different times because if she wasn't in Australia, the G-G was the one to do it. Hawke thought that the effects of the Acts were pretty important and historic, so he waited until the Queen  was actually in Australia to giver her assent. However, just becasue an Act has received assent, it is still not in force until it is proclaimed. That's why the two Acts were proclaimed to come into effect at the same instant in time, but due to time zones, the clock time was different. If the Australian Act came into force at 1600  Eastern Summer time, then the British Act came into force at 0500 GMT ( AEST = GMT + 11)

 

1 hour ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

the UK Act can be repealed at any time

Yes. But the Australian Act remains in force, so repealing the British Act would have no legal effect. 

[Marty_d]

17 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

We can change our names to numbers? The point of most public holidays is to celebrate something, is it not?

Possibly, but from the perspective of a wage slave, it's more about having a day off.

 

Put it this way - I don't have birthday cake on the Queen's birthday holiday (soon to be King's I guess), I don't watch the boats on Regatta day, I don't go to the Hobart Show on Show Day, and I try very hard not to go to the shops on Boxing Day.  But I still appreciate the time off.