Australia Day - thegoodwills.com

Australia Day and the Highland Clearances

australia-day-highland-clearances — Image: Ruined croft houses on Fuaigh Mòr in Loch Roag. The island was cleared of its inhabitants in 1841 and is now used only for grazing sheep. Wikipedia/Sarah Egan CC.

Australia Day came and went and alas, not once did I think about my birthplace, Scotland, or the country where I spent my childhood (New Zealand). The older I get and the further away from my Citizenship Day ceremony (January 26, 2000), the more it seems I have assimilated.

I do not mean assimilate in a flag-wearing, gum boot-tossing, beer-swilling, ‘It-was-in- the-‘Stralian-so-it-must-be-true’, sense.

Regardless, it is some admission from an iconoclastic alien, someone who had to be repeatedly pressed by the family lawyer to become an Australian citizen. Prior to 2000, I was a British citizen with permanent resident rights in New Zealand. I held an EU passport (what a relic that soon will be), with a return visa which over the years saw increasingly stringent conditions attached.

In the 1970s, when we first set off from New Zealand on our “OE” (overseas experience), we did not need a passport at all. When leaving New Zealand to visit Australia, we just filled in a two-sided visitor card; on which as it became apparent, too many people entered fictitious details.

Immigration Minister Ian McPhee introduced passports for Trans-Tasman travel in July 1981. The main aim was to stop abuses of the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangements.

Until that time, Kiwis and Aussies were free to travel back and forth to either country to live, work, play and inevitably meet their life partners and settle in one country or the other.

The evidence of this is seen in Census statistics which showed that 518,466 people born in New Zealand were living in Australia on Census night 2016. Conversely, 62,712 Australians were domiciled in New Zealand on their Census night in 2013.

While it may now seem like folklore, the free and easy Trans-Tasman arrangement fell apart due to revelations about the Mr Asia drug syndicate run by ruthless Kiwi criminal Terry Clark.

He was 2IC of the syndicate in the late 1970s, but rose to the top by ordering the killing of syndicate head Marty Johnstone. The influence Clark and his couriers had on importing heroin into Australia has been well-chronicled. The sordid story was also dramatized in Channel Nine’s Underbelly series.

The years between 1978 and 1983, when Clark died in a British prison, were trying times for law abiding, adventurous Kiwis who travelled across the ‘Dutch’ to work. Young Kiwis thought of Australia as the equivalent of eight countries (six states and two territories), with six times more people, hence unlimited job opportunities. They were escaping New Zealand at a time when unemployment was around 7%.

Australia’s unemployment was also high, but New Zealanders came looking for jobs with a built-in reputation for punctuality, honesty and hard work, Terry Clark notwithstanding.

When I became an Australian citizen on Australia Day 2000, I’ll admit I went into it a trifle blasé – for me it was a necessary formality. But the event in Brisbane Town Hall brought out a lot of emotions as I realised, in company with 699 others, many of whom were refugees, that for some people this ceremony was literally life-saving.

So to Australia Day 2020 and I’m watching the Wugulora Morning Ceremony on ABC TV. It is being held on the lawns of Sydney’s best-known waterside location, Barangaroo. As an armchair viewer, I was immediately touched by the dancing, singing and ceremony, not to mention appropriate speeches by NSW Governor Beazley and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

For me, the televised spectacle was exemplified by a young Aboriginal boy holding aloft two flags – in the right hand the Commonwealth’s symbol of colonial power and in the left the red, yellow and black Aboriginal flag. There was a decent-sized crowd there on the foreshore and the overall impression was one of peace, reverence and inclusion.

Elsewhere in Sydney that day, 10,000 [people marched to protest ‘Invasion Day’, the central tenet of which is that Australia Day should not be held on the day Queen Victoria’s vassals took the country by force.

As someone who was not only born in Scotland, but can trace ancestry back through the same small coastal fishing village to the 1700s, I should know more about the Highland Clearances or the ‘eviction of the Gaels’ than I do.

The eviction of rural tenants between 1750 and 1860 was driven by Scottish lairds, some of whom may have been English or at least owed money to the English. They drove the changes to increase their income and pay off debts.

Previously, farms were run on the runrig system of open fields and shared grazing. These collectives were replaced with large-scale pastoral farms stocked with sheep. Rents were much higher, with many displaced tenants forced into crofting communities, to be employed in fishing, quarrying or the kelp industry. The sudden demotion from farmer to crofter caused much resentment.

Between1815 and the 1850s, as a result of famine and/or collapse of crofting industries, crofting communities lost the means to support themselves. Assisted passages became commonplace, with landowners paying for their tenants to emigrate.

Some of this sounds a little bit like the oppression of Australia’s Aboriginal people, dispossessed and eventually herded into State-run settlement or missions.

Census papers list my forebears’ occupations as ‘agricultural worker’, ‘crofter’, ‘railway gatekeeper’, ‘flax mill worker’ or ‘labourer’. There is a high school teacher in the family tree, but in the main the Wilsons were working people and for centuries stayed in the one place. That is until my Dad had an epiphany and started looking for work in another country under the ‘assisted passage’ scheme. We missed out on going to Ontario for reasons which were never discussed with mere children. Instead, we were booked to sail to New Zealand in the southern winter of 1955. We arrived in Wellington and then took a night train to a small town in the centre of the North Island.

Bob’s song, Rangitiki

This week we watched the documentary, Gurrumul, a unique glimpse into the late indigenous singer’s life in a remote Arnhem Land community. Gurrumul became famous the world over, singing his own songs and stories in the Yolngu language. He touched people with his music, even when they did not understand the lyrics.

According to custom, the Yolngu people request that the names and images of tribal people not be used after their deaths. In Gurrumul’s case, they made an exception.

In a similar vein, Scotland has produced numerous bands that sing in Gaelic, including Manran, a band that recently toured Australia. I find myself moved in a spiritual way by Gurrumul’s music just as the often patriotic songs of modern Gaelic bands give me goose bumps. We don’t understand the content but we absorb the emotional message.

I’m never sure how many people actually look up links, although I must recommend the intriguingly-named Red Hot Chilli Pipers. I will leave you with this snippet from this energetic nine-piece band.

As always, the skirl of the bagpipes sends shivers down the spine and brings goose bumps to the forearms. Once a Scot always a Scot.

Red Hot Chilli Pipers

Last drinks at the Paradise Motel

alcohol-last-drinks — Image: Michael Jarmoluk, Pixabay.com

As I gave up drinking alcohol some 36 years ago, it was probably not surprising I forgot the essential ingredient for a house-warming party.

“Um,” said She Who Trusted Me with the Catering, “What about the ice – for those who are bringing something to drink?”

Off I went on a mercy dash to buy a bag of ice. The first guest had arrived before I returned and showed me the best way to prepare ice for an esky (drop it on the concrete driveway).

There was quite a bit of wine left over at the end, which suggested our guests were moderate drinkers (or intended that wine be left for mine hosts). In all, it was an enjoyable christening of the Paradise Motel (named after one of my more fanciful songs).

My mind turned to this subject with a timely new report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare about the effect of drugs and alcohol on the health of the general public.

This intersected nicely with an observation made by an emergency medicine veteran. His view was that if everyone gave up drinking alcohol and taking illicit drugs, Emergency Department staff would then have ample time to care for people who are genuinely sick.

The National Hospital Morbidity Database showed that in 2017-2018, there were 136,000 same day or overnight hospital admissions for a drug-related principal diagnosis. On its own, alcohol accounted for 53% of these admissions. No prizes for speculating about the other 47%.

Ah, you are thinking, the wowser’s view: “all health problems caused by drugs and alcohol are self-inflicted.”

Perhaps the ER veteran’s views would also include people whose health has deteriorated over time as a result of smoking tobacco.

The AIHW report confirms a noticeable decline in the use of tobacco in the 14 and over age group (from 24.3% in 1991 to 12.2% in 2016). Despite this impressive statistic, smoking is still the leading cause of cancer in Australia (22% of the cancer burden).

Alcohol abuse, however, is a far more worrying problem. The World Health Organisation found that 3 million deaths result every year from harmful use of alcohol (5.3 % of all deaths). The harmful use of alcohol is a factor in more than 200 disease and injury conditions.

It is generally accepted that (excessive) alcohol consumption and its aftermath contributes to more than 6000 deaths in Australia every year.

You’d never know it, but sometimes in the privacy of our own lounge room, we watch the reality TV show, RBT (the ex-probation officer and the (sober) ex-journalist relishing the opportunity to make snide comments). We did sympathise to a degree with the young chap who freely admitted to using cannabis every day (‘but I don’t drink alcohol at all’). Nevertheless the law finds that he is still driving under the influence and he thereby paid a price.

A month or so ago I had to drive to Toowoomba for the day and was stopped by a roadside breath test crew. Did I say this was at 9.10am on a weekday? She Who Still Enjoys a Drink or Two observed that such roadside blitzes often catch people who are still over the blood alcohol level limit after a night of partying.

The AIHW report found that while the majority of Australians drink alcohol, the overall daily intake is on a downward trend. The proportion of people drinking in excess of lifetime risk guidelines continues to decline.

The apparent consumption of alcohol in 2017-2018 was equivalent to an average of 2.72 standard drinks per day per consumer of alcohol aged 15 and over.

That is a fair way below the binge drinking and ‘pre-loading’ that goes on among the must-get-drunk-to-socialise cohort.

Almost 40% of Australians aged 18 and over exceeded the single occasion risk guidelines by consuming more than four standard drinks in one sitting. About 1 in 6 (17.4%) Australians aged 14 and over put themselves or others at risk of harm while under the influence of alcohol in the last 12 months.

I guess these are the people the RBT teams are out to catch.

Alcohol consumption inevitably increases on festive occasions like Christmas, New Year and public holidays like Australia Day. Special birthday and anniversaries are also vulnerable times for those who find it difficult to stop after two or three.

So how much is too much? The Australian Bureau of Statistics defines binge drinking as more than 7 drinks a night for men, and more than 5 for women. The NHMRC Australian Alcohol Guidelines defines excessive drinking as more than 4 standard drinks per night.

So how did we all go after those festive season parties? Many start at home and stay there. Others start with a few at-home drinks (sometimes known as pre-loading), before partygoers wisely catch taxis to the next venue, where the drinking continues.

Drink-driving laws have done much to help drinkers self-regulate. Many of the people stopped by officers on RBT were consciously monitoring their drinking.

But not everyone is as keen to avoid losing their drivers’ licence. In my court reporting days for a daily newspaper, I recall cases where the defendant was found to have a blood alcohol level of (extreme example) 0.34 – quite a long way beyond the Australian limit of 0.05). Quite often people with this level of blood alcohol have been found asleep at the wheel of a stationary vehicle (and a jolly good thing too).

Not that it should fall to me to make such withering observations, but I sometimes wonder how the evening ended for three young women, so much under 18 and under the influence after the footy (about 10pm) that they took off their high heeled shoes and wobbled down Milton Road.

“Are we going clubbing?” I heard one of them ask a less-than sober friend. “Do you reckon we should we catch a cab to Valley or walk?”

Given that a round of four beers at the footie will set you back $40 or so, this type of drinker is unlikely to belong to the ‘average’ household that drinks $32 worth of alcohol per week. Did you notice that the NIHW report implicates adolescents as young as 14? In a country where the legal drinking age is 18, this implies that older friends (or family) are buying alcohol for the under-agers.

The AIHW report found that 9.1% of adolescent males and 6.8% of females aged 12-17 exceed the adult guidelines for single occasion risk.

Young people are arguably more likely to be influenced by alcohol advertising at major sports events, prompting targeted opposition from alcohol education lobbyists.

You might have heard tennis ace Nick Kyrgios say to John McEnroe after Tuesday’s night’s Australian Open win – ‘he’s had too many beers’ – a response to a spectator who yelled out something incomprehensible.

The National Alliance for Action on Alcohol is taking on the Australian Open, urging organisers to consider the role of advertising in youth drinking. An e-petition to this effect has so far gathered 151 signatures.

Another critic observed: “…exposure to alcohol advertising places children at greater risk of drinking earlier and at more dangerous levels than they otherwise would.”

This is a long way from my youth in 1960s rugby-mad New Zealand, where drinking beer to excess was considered to be a badge of manhood. It’s not, but I guess the statistics in 2020 show that more of us realise that now.

Australia Day and the beach

mindil-beach-australia-day — Mindil Beach, Darwin, 2013 (not Australia Day). Photo by Bob Wilson

There’s nothing much planned here for Australia Day (aka Invasion Day) except a trip to the (doggie) beach and an evening neighbourhood gathering at a local park.

You won’t find much flag-wearing/waving, lamb eating, dunny-racing, gumboot-tossing fervour in this essay, probably because I am among the 16% of Australians who think a national day of commemoration is unnecessary.

(Robbie Burns’ birthday (today) being the exception to the rule – Ed).

The headline item in a recent Australian Institute survey was that 84% of Australians believe it is important to have such a day. The Australian Institute survey also found that 56% of us don’t care which day it is held, just as long as we have one.

Then, if you want to buy into the ever-growing Australia Day shouting match between the extremes of the conservative side of politics and the so-called bleeding hearts, 49% of people surveyed said Australia Day should not be held on a date that is offensive to our indigenous people. (Here, here – Bob and Ed)

The other 51% probably thought there was nothing ill-timed or insensitive about Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement (a year ahead), of the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook’s first voyage to Australia. Earlier this week the PM said the government will spend $6.7 million to sail a replica of Cook’s boat, The Endeavour, around Australia in 2020. The circumnavigation would be managed ‘sensitively’, Arts Minister Mitch Fifield added, and will present views both from the ship and from the shore.

The circumnavigation should, all things considered, lead to a lot of beach traffic, where sightings will be sought of The Endeavour in full sail. No mention of the fact that then Lieutenant Cook didn’t circumnavigate Australia on his journey here.

Life’s a beach – unless you live in Birdsville

If you were one of the 225 people in the national survey of 1,417 who don’t see the need for a national day of commemoration, you should at least spend part of Australia Day at a beach.

Although Australia’s vastness straddles three oceans, we are in but 7th place when it comes to countries with the longest coastlines. Canada wins, by a long margin.

Where Australia has the advantage, when it comes to people who like to surf, swim, fish, walk or just lie in the sun, is that we have 11,761 beaches, about 3,000 of them suitable for surfing. Furthermore, the weather is suitable for beach activities all year round in most States.

It could be argued then, that the quest for an ideal beach is far easier in Australia. Ideal in this context means a beach where there are as few people as possible, like one of the remote beaches of New Zealand’s East Cape. Of course, I am assuming you prefer to walk on a deserted beach instead of sharing a swathe of sand with 40,000 people (Bondi). And there are plenty of seldom explored beaches to go around if you are keen. You can get to them by driving (4WD), walking, or by boat or helicopter. No mystery as to who uses them: Australia has 5 million fishermen, 2.5 million surfers and 110,000 members of Lifesaver clubs, for a start.

Beach-loving surfer Brad Farmer wrote a book in 1984 documenting the country’s best 1,200 beaches across six states. It didn’t stop there. In 2000, Farmer and his pal, coastal scientist Professor Andy Short, agreed to collaborate and produce the benchmark of Australia’s ‘best 101 beaches’. (Queenslanders may be miffed to find there were only four beaches in the top 20 for 2018, even if No 1 was Fitzroy Island’s Nudey Beach.)

cape-hillsborough-beach — Cape Hillsborough, kangaroo beach, photo by Bob Wilson

I have not read Farmer’s book, but hope that Cape Hillsborough near Mackay got a mention. This relatively small beach, surrounded by a national park with steep, walkable headlands, is inhabited by kangaroos, often seen on the beach and in the water. We’ve been there twice, the second time (left) it rained.

Farmer, who is now Tourism Australia’s global beach ambassador, wrote a piece in The Guardian Weekly in which he did not mention Australia Day once, although he believes beaches form an integral part of our national identity.

Even if you don’t belong to the majority who believe it is important to celebrate Australia’s place as a first world, mostly tolerant democracy, you could at least look to some of the nation’s virtues. A quest for the ideal beach is not a bad way to appreciate living in a spacious, mostly convivial and civilised country. Since 85% of us live within 50 kms of the coast, it is an inevitability that most of us will spend some time at one of the 11,000+ beaches catalogued by Brad Farmer.

Within an hour’s drive of our well-populated coastal strip, one can find a surf beach, a beach where the snapper are running, a flat, shallow beach suitable for small children, a (long) stretch of beach where dogs are allowed off-leash and so on.

Those of us who like to combine bush-walking with beach-going can have the best of both worlds in places like Cape Hillsborough or Noosa National Park. If you’re not fond of crowds and looking for some splendid isolation, you can clamber down a makeshift track to a small rocky beach and just enjoy it; sketching, writing poetry or just contemplating (until the tide comes in).

However, you can see how beaches can become crowded at peak times. Sydney’s Bondi Beach (2nd) somehow made its way into a list of the world’s top five most crowded beaches. The others are Ipanema (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Coney Island (New York, US) Brighton Beach (UK) and South Beach (Miami US).

Tourism Australia research reveals that 75% of inbound tourists nominated visiting beaches as their number one choice of experiences. Occasional media reports of bluebottle plagues, shark attacks and crocodile sightings never seem to dent visitor enthusiasm.

Farmer, a beach enthusiast since he started surfing at 24, recommends choosing your beaches discerningly, based on all the elements you are looking for. In our case, a long, windswept beach where the tide goes out a long way is an ideal beach upon which to let dogs off the leash. Of course it must be a designated dog beach and owners must carry poo bags at all times.

He suggests that, increasingly, people are looking to combine their beach holiday with a digital detox. To do so, one must seek out the unfashionable, hard to get to beaches with poor Wi-Fi. As Farmer says (and perhaps he had Straddie, Bribie or Moreton Island in mind), they must be the beaches with “weathered characters with yarns as deep as the salt in their veins and a pristine natural environment”.

“These low-key, under-the-radar beaches are often the ones that create lasting, formative memories for our children and the beach child in all of us.”

So think of that on Saturday, while you are sun-baking, swimming, walking, surfing, fishing, playing cricket with a tennis ball or just simply walking the dog.

The lamb roast is happening on Monday.

Further reading: FOMM back pages

My friend Angela writes lively travelogues including this tribute to Queensland.

A final reminder that the (optional) FOMM subscriber drive closes on January 31. Thanks to those who already subscribed $5, $10 or more to help cover website administration costs. If you want to know how to do this, email me directly at bobwords <at> ozemail.com.au.

Speed dating with Stan

Stan-old-tv-1970s — Photo: Paul Townsend https://flic.kr/p/f9o9TQ

Sometime in December, I signed up for a one-month free trial with a streaming service, just to see how it measured up. A week later I was telling a young friend, “I’ve been speed dating Stan.”

He gave me that WTF look 30-somethings sometimes give their elders: “It’s called binge-watching, Dude.”

And so it is. If you succumb to the marvels of being able to stream TV drama to your mobile phone, iPad, laptop and now even to your big screen TV, you can watch anything, anytime, anywhere.

I rather quickly got caught up in the misadventures of one Walter White, a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who turns to making and dealing methamphetamine as a way of funding chemo for his newly diagnosed lung cancer.

An implausible premise, maybe, but that peerless actor Brian Cranston, as Walter, pulls it off, in each and every improbable episode. His dunderhead brother-in-law Hank, who works for the Drug Enforcement Administration, continues not to see the forest for the trees.

Binge-watching is an unhealthy past-time, though, earbuds in, snuggling into your bed at 7.30pm ready to watch back-to-back episodes of Game of Thrones, House of Cards or Breaking Bad. There is the potential to fragment the family unit more than ever before. Mum’s in the lounge watching catch-up TV episodes of Gardening Australia. Teenage son is downstairs watching who knows what, teenage daughter is Skyping her friends who are backpacking around Europe; Dad’s got his headphones on watching Trapped on his smart phone and Little Dan is playing X-Box in the rumpus room. It’s a long way from the nuclear family enjoying My Three Sons, The Munsters or Mr Ed on a black and white TV.

I rarely watch more than two episodes of Breaking Bad in a night and not every night, but I’m half-way through season two already.

“Have you got to the bath scene yet?” my son asked. Yes I had. And it confirmed the wisdom of my decision to watch this dark comedy alone, as She Who Has an Aversion to TV Violence would have puked.

Oops, I think that’s what they call a ‘spoiler’ in streaming TV circles. Any day now someone will form a covers band and call it The Bath Scene from Breaking Bad.*

Call me a late adaptor, but what drove me to engage with streaming TV was the appallingly sparse fare offered by free-to-air TV in December/January.

Stan’s free trial period expired fairly quickly. I knew this when $10 was deducted from my credit card. Oh sure, I knew they would do this unless I told them not to – but they could have emailed, sent a text?

“Dude, we see you’re a fan of Breaking Bad! Where’s our money, Yo!”

Streaming services offer great value to people who like watching a TV series from beginning to end. The other investment I made, in what amounts to creating in-house entertainment in a time devoid of quality TV programming, was to purchase Google’s Chromecast device. Apple, Amazon and others have their own version of a device which enables you to ‘cast’ a TV programme from your phone or iPad to the big screen at home. These gadgets are inexpensive for what they offer. But most households will have to buy a Wi-Fi extender to ensure the programmes stream and play without buffering or crashing.

If this is old technology, what’s next?

This is already old technology as most “Smart TVs” made after 2014 (obviously not ours), come with Stan and Netflix built-in. So with the variety of ways one can seek out TV content that is not free-to-air (and I have not even mentioned Torrens), commercial TV is seriously up against it. As an extra enticement, most streaming services, unlike Pay TV, can be watched ad free.

Harold Mitchell, chairman of Free TV Australia, launched a campaign in October 2016 lauding the industry’s 60 years of achievements, its 15 million audience reach, stressing how badly Australia needs free TV.

In AdNews, Mitchell defended free to air television, saying it invests more than $1.5 billion in local content, employing 15,000 people.

He warned that commercial TV’s investment in (local) content is under threat from unregulated digital media companies,

“Australian licence fees are about three and a half times greater than in the next highest market, which is Singapore, and more than 115 times greater than in the United States.”

At its best, free TV offers live events like cricket tests, rugby union, rugby league, AFL and soccer matches, golf tournaments, the Australian Open, the NRL Grand Final, the Olympics, Winter Olympics and, whether it’s your thing or not, 24/7 news. No matter how generally awful the evening programming is in the summer, if something dramatic happens anywhere in the world, you can be sure the ABC, SBS, 7, 9 and 10 will be right across it, instantly.

Nevertheless, if not for the Australian Open (tennis) or perhaps the Cricket, there would no incentive to turn the TV on in January. There are repeats, repeats of repeats, vapid soapies; Kevin McCloud’s bespoke TV shows about people spending copious sums fixing up falling down buildings, the ubiquitous cooking competitions, and a puzzling show where a man and a woman loll about on a bed in their underwear. I gather there is supposed to be ‘chemistry’. Walter White would give them an F.

A day to mourn dispossession & dispersal

Last night I flicked through TV news to see how Australia Day was portrayed. It was as you might imagine. Flags and more flags, sausages on the barbie, gumboot-throwing competitions, families at the beach, cars with flags fluttering from their windows. Some channels covered the protests in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, the latter ‘erupting in violence’ as one person allegedly set fire to a flag. Tens of thousands gathered in capital cities, all calling for a change of date. Many indigenous people call it “Invasion Day” – the anniversary of the British First Fleet arriving in Australia.

Fremantle Council, despite bowing to pressure from Canberra to hold Citizenship ceremonies, has become a poster child for the #changethedate movement. Council plans to hold a “culturally inclusive” celebration on Saturday (despite WA Premier Barnett urging Councillors to “pull their heads in”.)

Overwhelmed by jingoism, we engaged the ‘casting’ device, which not only allows you to watch Stan or Netflix, but also catch up on ABC, SBS and commercial station programmes. So far we have watched Outback ER, an ABC reality TV doco set in Broken Hill. What does happen when you have a heart attack and you are 500 kms away from cardiac specialists?

We watched Concussion on Stan last night. At $10 a month and no advertising, Stan is a no-brainer option for a media consumer. It is dearer than free TV, certainly, but the options are seemingly limitless.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably have to sign up for Netflix as well, as I see there is a fourth (and maybe even a fifth) season of House of Cards in the wings. I figure I owe Netflix money as I watched all three series of House of Cards last year during my one-month trial (39 episodes).

Now that’s what I call speed dating!

*Cultural reference to a 1990s Melbourne band called The Shower Scene from Psycho.

Our Australian day of shame

Convict Road — Devine’s Hill convict road sculpture photo by Laurel Wilson

We were on the road somewhere outside Sydney when a hotted-up Mazda zoomed up next to us at the lights, twin cams throbbing. From each rear window protruded an Australian flag, fluttering like when you accidently shut your frock in the door. We sat there, waiting for the green, making cynical old fart, iconoclastic noises about faux patriotism, Bogans and drivers who just cannot sit behind a caravan.

Meanwhile, Australia Day has come and gone; Shane Howard got a gong and used the occasion to highlight the iniquities and injustices of this colonised land. As an accidental Australian (twice emigrated) I hesitate to write anything acerbic about this country, my adopted home. I did not go to school here, so even though I studied Australian history at university and watch Better Homes and Gardens, there are gaps in my education through which you could drive a Holden Ute laden with slabs of beer. But I seize every opportunity to learn more, to lift the rug and look under it for First Nation stories. As chance would have it, we stumbled across two relics of our colonial past while on a circuitous road trip to the Illawarra Folk Festival and back via Tamworth. The first was the remains of a convict-built, 43-kilometre road near Wisemans Crossing in New South Wales.

Working on the chain, gang

The Great North Road was built by convict labour between 1826 and 1834 to provide a freight route from Sydney to the Hunter Valley. From Wisemans Crossing (free ferry service, thanks to the NSW government), you can drive up the road a piece, park and walk your way up Devine’s Hill. It was a hot day, but we persevered, marvelling at the 19^th century engineering ingenuity and the harsh life lived by convicts. As we read about the convicts who were sentenced to serve time on ‘Iron Gangs’ to build roads, our aching calf muscles seemed a mere trifle. British convicts who had committed offences in Australia would often be sentenced to work in chain gangs, their legs in shackles. Once they had served their sentences, the shackles were removed and they were transferred to a Road Party.

Easier to work without shackles, but the work was still hard yacker, chiselling 250kg blocks out of the sandstone hills and building buttresses and retaining walls.

The chain gangs used hammer and chisels to make blocks or they bored holes in the sandstone using jumper bars and sledgehammers. The engineers then placed explosives in the holes and sliced large blocks from the hills above. There are tributes to the convicts along the 1.8 km Devine’s Hill walk which tell of the harsh terms of crime and punishment in those times, often being incarcerated for lengthy periods for what we would see as trivial offences.

Stumbling across the First Fleet

Later, we were heading for Nundle, a small town 60 kms from Tamworth, around which something of a fringe country music festival has developed. On the way, we stopped at Wallabadah, which hosts Australia’s only memorial to the First Fleet, which arrived in Port Jackson on January 26, 1788.

The personal mission of stonemason Ray Collins, the First Fleet Memorial is a small park festooned with stone tablets, listing the names of every person who travelled on the 11 ships sailing from Britain. Collins, whose interest in the project was driven by discovering his own convict heritage, has since included a tribute to the second fleet.

This is more of a pilgrimage site than a tourist attraction. Most travellers find it by accident, stopping at the public facilities which adjoin the memorial. It was strangely moving though, walking around the gardens reading the names of this country’s first European ancestors, who thought Australia was unpopulated (Terra Nullius).

Terra Incognito might have been a more apt term, meaning unknown lands which had not yet been explored. The original inhabitants were there, though seldom seen. Early explorers made ship’s log entries about seeing plumes of smoke, from fires deliberately lit by Aborigines as a means of caring for and regenerating an arid land.

What we were not taught

As most Australians are now aware, even if they were not taught the history at school, the original inhabitants pre-dated the first fleet by at least 40,000 years. Australia Day as we celebrate it now, with thong-throwing competitions, colonial re-enactments and cockroach racing, is grossly insulting to the First Nations people, the Aborigines. I could go on, but you all know the stories of land-grabbing, exploitation, the spread of (European) diseases, genocide and our often misguided removal of children from their families.

There was the grand gesture, the Stolen Generation apology in 2008 by former PM Kevin Rudd. Apology aside, nothing can make that right. All we Anglo-Saxon Australians can do is to make symbolic gestures, like outspoken songwriter Paddy McHugh did at The Dag (a sheep station converted into a wedding reception and conference centre and alt-country music venue).

He began his set by acknowledging the original owners of the land and then, the current owner. We could all do this when the occasion arises, but so few of us do.

Meanwhile on Tuesday

On Australia Day we went on a vintage train excursion from Warwick to Nobby, along with 90 other people, many of them sporting Australia Day paraphernalia and greeting friends with “Happy Australia Day”. Excuse me, but this country’s blood-soaked history is nothing to be happy about. As indigenous journalist Stan Grant said, in a stirring speech which has been seen around the world, Aborigines were “marooned on the tides of history to the fringes of Australian society”.

Still, is there really any harm in tourists using a public holiday to spend some money keeping the smoky smell of our colonial days alive? The Nobby craft shop, run by local volunteers, did solid trade, as did Rudd’s Pub, named not for a twice-ex Prime Minister, but the author Steele Rudd, of the Dad and Dave stories about sheep shearing and dances down the hall on a Saturday night, damper and billy tea.

It is a long way removed from Carnarvon Gorge and its ancient painted rock walls. Songwriter Garry Koehler’s song The Gallery was inspired, he tells me, by the painted hands, which to him appeared to be reaching out; imploring, “Help – can you fix this mess?” Koehler told his audience in Tamworth last week that the rock carvings at Carnarvon date back 30,000 years.

“And we’ve been here only 200 years and stuffed it up.”

Well, 228 years if you want to be picky, but there has not been much to write home about for Australia’s aborigines since 1988. Indigenous musicians and kindred spirits had plenty to say though, notably Kev Carmody and Archie Roach, Yothu Yindi, also Shane Howard and Neil Murray, to name a few.

You’ll have your own views on Australia Day, as do my 298 Facebook ‘friends’, and some of them have far more strident things to say.

She Who Is Finally Mentioned favours calling January 26 “Survival Day”. It’s less negative than Invasion Day and many of this country’s 669,900 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people already call it just that.

They have survived, despite everything.