Celebrating Indigenous survival makes January 26 meaningful

Last week, the Derech Eretz group of Jewish volunteers in Indigenous communities experienced a positive way to mark the controversial date. TAHLIA BOWEN was among them.

January 26. Australia Day. Invasion Day. Survival Day. Day of Mourning. Citizenship ceremonies. Australian of the Year Awards. Nondescript barbecue day? Penalty rates! Public holiday (depending on who you work for). 

January 26 means different things to different Australians, and what it means to each Australian is changing year to year. Public sentiment towards changing the date of "Australia Day", a movement led by First Nations peoples, grows annually.

But some spearheads of this movement have more recently changed their tune. 

Until 2018, Amnesty Australia championed the "Change the Date" campaign. They asked the wider community to celebrate Australian nationhood on a date not representative of loss for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Since then, however, they have reached a new conclusion. Australia’s national story, stained with the legacies of dispossession, violence and continuing trauma, is not one to be celebrated any day of the year. 

This year, Amnesty articulated its stance on social media: “Changing the date doesn’t hold governments accountable, doesn’t acknowledge the pain of colonisation, and doesn’t hold us accountable as an organisation, or make us confront our part in the ongoing violence of colonisation”.