An address to the men of the Australian Natives’ Association Victorian branch
On 23 January 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip gave orders for the First Fleet to sail out of Botany Bay for Port Jackson. Only four days earlier, the last of the fleet’s 11 ships had completed its gruelling eight-month journey from Portsmouth to the New South Wales coast. That, however, was all Phillip needed to determine that the site proposed by Captain James Cook as an ideal location for the establishment of a penal colony was wholly unsuitable; and that Sydney Cove in Port Jackson, some 12km to the north, presented a far more viable alternative. Given all the fleet had endured, this short trip would perhaps have seemed a mere formality; it proved to be anything but. For two days, wild winds buffeted the fleet and prevented any ships from leaving the harbour. Not until midday on the 25th were Phillip and Second Lieutenant Philip Gidley King, aboard HMAT Supply, able to clear the bay. The rest of the fleet, meanwhile, would have to wait another day. Left to the mercy of the elements, they had been, as King noted in his journal, “obliged to wait for the ebb tide”.
In commemorating Australia Day, there is merit always in reflecting not only on the events of 26 January 1788 but on the broader events to which they connect. But on this occasion, the events just described seem to hold particular relevance. For while our struggles may pale into insignificance alongside those of the First Fleet, we may nonetheless draw some parallels between our present situation and the events just described. Over the last decade and a half, as hostility towards our founding epic has swelled and calls to change the date have been amplified, those of us who do take pride in our nation and its origins have been increasingly pushed to the margins, forced either to acknowledge the day surreptitiously or to subject ourselves to haranguing, intimidation, or even violence for attempting to do so more publicly. And although the push to change Australia Day has lost some momentum in recent years, actually acknowledging let alone celebrating Australia Day, despite the public holiday still afforded it, has remained taboo. Yet in the lead-up to this year’s event, there has been a palpable shift in sentiment. Beginning in late 2024, councils across Australia have been reversing decisions of recent years to move Australia Day events or scrap them altogether by again acknowledging 26 January. In December, the Taiwanese-owned and thus ironically named Australian Venue Company was forced into an embarrassing backflip after a leaked memo to managers advising them not to acknowledge Australia Day at their venues sparked public outrage. In recent weeks, polls conducted by the Institute of Public Affairs and News Corp respectively found that 69 per cent and 87 per cent of those surveyed wished for the date of Australia Day to remain unchanged. Speaking figuratively, one might say the tide is beginning to turn.
For us as nativists, these developments are clearly cause for optimism. We have been assured in recent years that the campaign to change the date reflected the popular will. Evidently, that is not the case. Far from being apathetic or even hostile to his cultural inheritance, the average Australian in fact adopts the far more natural position of taking pride in it. Having been browbeaten for years by the rabid minority, he simply needed to find his voice again.
But cause for optimism is not cause for complacency. Here it is worth returning to our earlier parallel with the men and women of the First Fleet. Though the abatement of the storm at Botany Bay allowed them to reach their destination and brought their remarkable voyage to a triumphant end, they knew their most serious challenge – that of establishing a colony in a harsh, alien landscape – still lay ahead. Similarly, we must realise that the rejection of the Invasion Day narrative and the wider embrace of Australia Day, and of Australian culture and identity more broadly, marks not the end of our struggle but only the beginning. We will need to endure and resist our enemies redoubling their efforts to quite literally tear down our history. More significantly, however, we will need to resist attempts to channel positive attitudes towards our national day into the ongoing effort to undermine the very notion of nationhood. As nativists, we understand that the nation is the product of ancestry and environment – what the great Percy Stephensen famously described as “race and place”. We may rightly say that the nation of Australia was not truly born until Federation, for it was in the decision to federate that the people of Australia recognised and embraced the transformative effect of their landscape. But if this represents the birth of the nation, the arrival of the First Fleet must represent its conception, for it was in this arrival that the nation-forming synthesis of people and environment began. Only with this understanding of what constitutes the Australian nation does a national day that commemorates the events of 26 January 1788 even begin to make sense. Yet we need only reflect on the most recent iterations of government-funded Australia Day events to know that their revival will be used to push the narrative of Australia as a multicultural success story. We can feel certain that the torrents of African, East Asian, and subcontinental migrants with which we have been flooded will serve as the face of such events, dutifully holding their Australian flags alongside those of their true nations to distract the average colourblind patriot from his own replacement. And we must not stand for it. We must hold firm in our conviction and in our message that an Australia divorced from its founding stock of Anglo-Celts and assimilated continental Europeans is no Australia at all. We must insist that a national day that not only fails to recognise this truth but that actively subverts it is one not worth celebrating. Most importantly, we must be prepared for the hostility we will face in doing so, even from those who should be our natural allies. The growing public aversion to mass immigration provides hope that the racial consciousness that served as the cornerstone of our nation’s foundation lies dormant still within the average Australian. But the mind virus that is liberalism has shown itself extraordinarily resistant to treatment. Though there can be no doubt the aversion just mentioned stems from a recognition of the incompatibility of these racial foreigners with our society, this understanding remains largely subconscious. Forcing the average Australian acknowledge this explicitly, not merely to others but also to himself, is an arduous task, for he will tie himself in all sorts of knots to avoid doing so. But, like the men and women of the First Fleet, we have no choice but to persist in our efforts. Like them, our survival depends upon it.
I invite you all to celebrate and enjoy this Australia Day long weekend, both for what it commemorates and for the victory over our ideological opponents its broader embrace by the general population represents. Know, however, that our success has come in what is but a minor skirmish in the broader culture wars and that ultimate victory will require that we dig in for the long haul. Should we require inspiration, we need look no further than those first arrivals on this shore, whose extraordinary achievements we honour today.
M.J. Brown
27 January 2025