TRANSCRIPT:
(This transcript is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
Dr Chris Reynolds
Governor Lachlan Macquarie loved a good party. But when he arrived in Australia, he came to a place that was the most corrupt government and colony in the British Empire. It made Dodge City look like play school.
And the first thing he had to do was clean it out. And so the 102nd Regiment, known as the Rum Corps, because that's what they dealt with and that's what they drank, were put on a boat instantly and sent back to England. Well, after several months, he arrived in January 1810.
So six months later, it was the king's birthday, June the 6th, I think it was. And so he thought, well, I think we should have a party. So he opened up the gardens in front of Government House and said, we're going to have a celebration.
Well, the population, remember that 90% of them were convicts or the children of or the progeny or emancipates of convicts. And they'd never seen a governor treat them so well. So they stood in absolute amazement, had a wonderful time at Governor Macquarie's party and went home quite happy about the new governor.
Well, a few months later, the governor decided that we really need to do a bit more of this. So up and a little bit over the hill from Government House, he had this big area cleared. He wanted a park.
And so we'll call it Hyde Park. And we'll have a spring carnival, he said. They put up a fence and they're going to have a horse race.
And it's quite detailed to read about the horse race and how Wentworth, William Wentworth said he would have won the race if there hadn't been a dog that ran across the course in front of him. I think he just got second and he wasn't terribly happy about it. But anyway, I think everybody, the 3000 people in Sydney all showed up for this party and Lachlan said there'll be no drinking, but it didn't stop them partying until the early hours of the morning.
It was another raging success for the young colony. Well, he kept up this sort of celebration. But then in 1818, the 30th anniversary of the landing in Sydney of the First Fleet, there was a fellow that had come out from England and he'd got himself in a bit of trouble because he forged a document to do his family inheritance.
Dad had died and there wasn't a will and whatever. Anyway, the poor fellow got caught in the middle of it and he got sentenced to 14 years transportation. It was sort of a crime, but he was an architect and of some fame.
And in fact, he was a friend of Arthur Phillip and he arrived with a letter of reference. I've got 14 years in the colony, but I've got a letter of reference from Arthur Phillip. So he got on rather well.
And in fact, Francis Greenway got to work with Elizabeth MacArthur and a few others and designed a lot of and set up the streets and named it. Well, anyway, because it was 1818 and the 30th anniversary of the First Fleet anchoring in Sydney Cove on January 26, because Arthur had been, Arthur Phillip had been here since the 18th. So he'd already been around a couple of weeks and he himself had arrived for the second time on the 25th.
But it was when the fleet came in and he put up the flag and said, over here, fellas, because the Aborigines didn't care about the flag and the French knew they were there, that this was the day that Governor Phillip, Governor Macquarie, decided he was going to have a celebration. So what he did, he said, well, all the public servants, all the officers can have a day off and I'm going to give you an extra pound of fresh meat. A big deal then, I suppose, fresh meat.
And I'm going to have 30 guns, because it's the 30th anniversary, fire from Dawes Point. And more than that, I think we'll have a regatta. We'll get the boats out and we'll go up and down Sydney Harbour.
And it says the 30 gun salute from Dawes Point and a regatta in Sydney Harbour. The advertisement in the Sydney Gazette read, the public is respectfully informed that the experiment steam packet will ply during the regatta on the day of the 30th anniversary of the colony. And so get yourself down to the dock at 11 o'clock if you want to be on the boat to get out on the harbour to watch the regatta.
So, yes, he lined up all the troops and he walked along the 48th Regiment and he had a wonderful time. And then he had a dinner for the officers. Well, after the dinner, I don't know how he did all of this, it's a big day, then Lady Macquarie and Francis Greenway decide that they're going to have a ball.
So on the ball, this comes out of the Sydney Gazette of the 3rd of January, 1818. Now that's research, you know, the newspaper, I've got the newspaper for the day. And Francis Greenway put up a banner and on the banner he wrote, in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the colony of New South Wales established by Arthur Phillip, whose virtues and talents entitle him to the grateful remembrance of this country and to whose audacious exertions the present prosperous state of the colony may chiefly be ascribed.
So they all had a wonderful time at the ball and the dinner and the regatta, great day. So it went on to be called Foundation Day and we'll do it again next year. And I think they have, you can tell me if I'm wrong, do they have a regatta on Sydney Harbour on Australia Day still? I think they do.
I thought I read that it still goes on. But it certainly has something to do, it evolved, if that's the right word, into the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. And that's where that all came.
So it sort of got lost in a side paragraph, but I'm sure there was a link that said, oh well why don't we race down to Hobart, you know? Go to Hobart, you've seen the weather. But anyway, whoever got there and back again, you see. So anyway, they thought that was a bit of fun.
So the party went on. Now the thing about Foundation Day is that as I thought about this, for February, January 26th, I thought it really is a bit of a misnomer really because nothing really happened on the 26th. It just said that the ships pulled in, the officers got off, they put a flag up, they pulled out the cheap wine that they'd bought from South Africa, they toasted the king's health and watched the sun set over the gum trees.
Well, good afternoon. But it was hardly a Foundation Day. The day, the Foundation Day, was a week or so later on February the 7th.
Now if you know the story, on February the 6th, everybody finally came ashore. They cleared out a great piece of land and they put up the tents and Philip said, well you can have a party and I'll go and hide on one of the vessels so I don't know what's going on. So he said you can have the wine, give out the wine and the rum and I'll go and hide.
Well, it was a phenomenal party, everybody, the bands were playing, the Aborigines had never seen a corroboree like it. They couldn't believe it, look at these blokes. And so it went on and it was only this phenomenal storm, a big southerly came through that made them go inside and a branch of a tree fell down and killed four sheep and Colonel Ross wasn't terribly happy because they were his sheep.
And this is all in the diaries about this incredible night. Well, the next morning on the 7th, Philip got them all up, all the convicts were on the wet grass because it had been raining the night before and everybody got in uniforms. The bands marched up and down and everybody stood there and then Collins, David Collins, the new attorney, judge advocate, read out the letters patent from the king and therein declared that Britain had taken over and owned Australia, which it did by international law.
And Judge Blackstone, I think his name is, the famous judge that still gets referred to centuries later, was an incredible intellect. He actually said that the moment the king signed the letters patent under international law, Britain owned Australia. And that sentence comes out of the Mabo Law Court case where the judges quote, where the judges in the Mabo case quote Judge Blackstone.
So it was actually February the 7th was the big day that we, as it were, that Britain actually came and took control of Australia. Best thing that ever happened to the nation, of course. Best thing developed came here.
The greatest empire in the world came with all of its development into this place and developed it. But here's the funny thing about it. Some years later, we're going to talk about a celebration day.
The big day that we should be celebrating is when we became a nation. Here we go. And General Lord Houghton proclaimed the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia on January the 1st, 1901.
That became Australia Day because that is the day of a nation. And if you ever see the photographs of the crowds in Sydney, it was just a massive crowd. Everybody was there.
And in Melbourne, it was the same. And, of course, I forget the Duke's name, I should remember, that came and opened, it was there in the Melbourne Town Hall. A phenomenal event.
And people had pride in this wonderful, fantastic country. It was Australia and they were proud to be Australian. That should have been Australia Day.
No, we're all pissed after New Year's Eve. Oh, that's it. I know, I know.
It's all this long weekend business, you know. Well, it doesn't really matter, does it, really, if we leave it for a couple of weeks. We get to sober up, you know, think about going back to work.
Oh, we can have another day off. It brings us to a point. A few other things happened.
In 1949, they passed the Australian Citizenship Act on January 26. Why is this important? Because up until that time, we were all, and continue to be, British subjects. And from that time on, we became Australian citizens.
So it really becomes Australians Day, and that's why we still should demand that people becoming citizens have it happen on the 26th of January. Not all this rubbish about other days and other things. That's our day.
If you want to join this club, then that's when you're going to get it done. Is that fair enough? You liked that, did you? More to come. That's the day.
So it's a good day for that reason only. It wasn't until, in actual fact, 1935, that the states decided that they were going to celebrate Australia Day. But as they do, they, you know, fluffed it here, and we'll have a long weekend, and it wasn't really the 26th.
And quite surprisingly, it was under the Keating government in 1990. I've got it somewhere on the page. Someone tell me.
Keating government, 1994, if he was the Prime Minister then. But he said, I've had enough. We're going to have a national day on the 26th, and you can stop all this moving it around for your long weekends, which I found interesting.
We look back, and the Labor Party used to be quite nationalistic and, you know, love the country. And it seems that there's other opinions these days of where it is all going. But nevertheless, that was what's happening.
So it's 1994, and you stop and reflect and say, well, you know, it doesn't seem like we were terribly patriotic. When you look at today's events in America with the inauguration and the whole world is watching him promise to look after the Constitution, and I think, when did our Prime Minister ever say, I promise to keep, maybe he doesn't, I just don't know, to get the seat on TV. I promise to uphold the Constitution and all that it stands for.
He does, does he? Well, we need to televise it. He puts his hand on the Bible. Well, we need to televise it, don't we? I thought you've just got to promise to look after somebody's hairs.
Yeah, the Governor-General. Yes, so we should. You see, when we got to 1901, I mean, people there had a dream.
We became a nation, a democracy. We all voted, without a revolution, without a war, we voted to become a federation because we had a dream of becoming we the people form this country. We the people form this government, this democracy, a system of law and order and government process, and that is what we the people stood for at that point.
It became our country. You could not be, really, push and shove, an Australian before that time because there wasn't a nation by legal recognition called Australia. But we became Australian then and certainly by the time we got to the Australian Act of 1949.
Now, the problem is that as we look at all of this and we wonder about Australia Day and we the people, we still don't really celebrate it on just the one day, and it doesn't really matter if it's on the 26th or the 1st. It's our day. It's our day when we remember that we are a nation.
And people, as I was saying, had a dream about what they could become, the prosperity, the democracy, the freedom, the safety. All of this became part of our culture. You know, I remember as a child, well, as a child, a 12-year-old boy pushing my pushbike around the suburbs of Sydney selling newspapers, a big bin in front of the bike, and I had a whistle and I blew it and people would come out and buy a newspaper.
And I remember one day, I still remember, that on the front page of the newspaper it just had this one big word or two words, girl raped. It was a total event. It was a catastrophe that a woman had been raped.
And, I mean, now we're so moved to just sort of accept crime where our country was a much, it seems to me, a safer place. It was such news that there was this sort of violence in our country. And yet we have lost, as it were, or our dream is being eroded.
And yet it seems that there were people who came to this country to want to share that dream. We are a country of migrants, people who came after the war or before the war. Even at 1900, we think there were lots of people from Europe.
There weren't. It was 95% of the people in this country in 1900 had come from Britain. We were a British country up until that point.
Now things have changed, but people came because they wanted to share that incredible dream of this wonderful country. And it is a wonderful country. But what is obviously happening is it's being undermined.
We actually have people who stand in the street and want to hate our country. We are importing trouble. And we have an immense immigration flood into our country that you've just heard of recently.
But we are importing trouble. We have people that bring their racial hatred, their violence with them, their anti-Australian attitudes. And indeed, they've even brought terrorism into our country.
I mean, I look at the police and they're so dressed up, I think they'd scare Martians. And you look at them, have a look at the stuff these guys have got on them. And now they walk.
And you think, what are you expecting? The Martians themselves. What are you going to do? I mean, which gun would you pull first? And what's the matter? When I grew up, they didn't have anything. They didn't even have guns.
And now they're all ready for... I feel like they'll watch too much television. They must. And then we have our own SWAT team.
Remember during the pandemic, and there was a protest against the pandemic and all the needles, et cetera, in Sydney. And they went to the war memorial in Melbourne, and they pulled out the blasted tank. I mean, I couldn't believe the police had a tank and they had to get it out.
I mean, what sort of a country have we become? We are suffering an erosion of that dream, of that sense of prosperity and democracy that made for this great country. And we even now have people that want to say, oh, we don't really want to recognise this nation. And indeed, I found that, and I really come and recognise a Stone Age religious, pagan religion that wants to say that I'm part of nature.
And because I am part of nature and this religion, I am more important than you are. And I don't accept it at all. And the thing that we have forgotten, the thing that we have forgotten is that we have so readily and quickly forgotten at the Second World War and the sacrifice that men and women gave up their lives and stopped an invasion because we came so close to not being a nation.
And I mean, in that shadow of that tragedy and the men and women who march every year in Anzac Day, it reminds us, it reminds me that we were born again as a nation after that event. We are Australian, we are free, we are prosperous, we are democratic because of the sacrifice that those people gave of their lives. And I will not have anybody tell us that they are more important because of their ancestry.
We start again from that date. And I am proud to be part of this phenomenal nation and that fantastic history. I will not have people down, deride our country, run us down.
I will not stand under three flags and I will not be welcomed to my own country. We have rights in this country and I love this country. I mean, I love the sunburned beaches and the incredible blue sky.
And I mean, I love the rocky mountains and the gum trees that stand like giants stretching towards the sky and the colour of the blue mountains and the eucalypts and the animals. I feed six kookaburras every afternoon that fly in and I stand there and feed them and talk to them, etc. I have wallabies in the backyard.
I mean, it's a phenomenal country that they will just come up. The animals are quite happy to be fed. They're quite happy to be fed, you know, and talk and they're just sort of there.
I mean, it's part of this incredible country. I love the diving and the skiing and I love the fun and the laughter that we can stop and have a beer and we're so open and friendly and able to be able to lend a hand to each other when we want to. And I will not be put down or told that we cannot celebrate this fantastic country.
We are Australia. We are free. Here comes Australia Day.
We will defend our right to have that day and we will celebrate it this week.
