Every year at this time the nation gnashes its teeth over the use of January 26 for Australia Day. This January’s gnashings are especially angry.
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But every year at this time this columnist, a thinking patriot, offers his suggestions of alternative appropriate days.
This year I brandish three new suggested dates, April 8, October 5 and December 24. I will sing those dates’ praises here in a moment.
As well today I re-propose one date, May 25, from last January’s unforgettable column on this subject.
First today I echo some sentiments from last January’s column. My suggestion then of May 25 noted it was the day, in 1940, when the great Australian immunologist and Nobel Laureate Howard Florey first saw, in his lab’s thriving mice, the breathtaking possibilities of what became penicillin. I imagine May 25 honouring every Australian of scientific achievement and genius.
Still recycling, I repeat my 2018 thought that the insistence on January 26 is so offensive to some Australians that we might pause to notice how time-bounteous a year is. It offers 365 echoingly-roomy days. Why have we fixed Australia Day in this one little, contentious corner of a year's roomy room.
And oh the towering insensitivity of those, led by our callously Christian Prime Minister, who cannot put themselves in the shoes of those first Australians who find January 26 a painful day. Yes, our Prime Minister, the shock-jocked Daily Telegraph classes and our cowardy-custard believe-in-nothing alternative prime minister (Bill Shorten has just this week promised to cling to January 26) Australia don't want a change of date. But change is coming. It is time to offer ultra-cautious, sheep-like Australians some alternative Australia Day dates that don't alarm and stampede them. So here goes.
One of my new recommendations, October 5, is the day (in 2009) when it was announced in Stockholm that Professor Elizabeth Blackburn had been awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine for her brilliant researches in crucial areas of disease and ageing.
She became the first Australian woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize and so down the years October 5 would be less about just Professor Blackburn, but would tick all sorts of boxes that honour all Australian women and Australian cerebral genius in all its extraordinary forms.
Another of my new recommendations, April 8, is the day (in 1800) of the first performance in Australia of a play by William Shakespeare. The popular historical drama Henry IV, part 1, was staged at The Theatre in Sydney’s Bligh Street, a convict-built venue opened by emancipated convict Robert Sidaway.
Though I say it myself, this suggestion is quite a brainwave, embracing as it does something of our very early white European history (an emancipist! convict builders!) and the cultural blockbuster of the arrival of the timeless works of our civilisation’s towering poet in this new country so very far away from his, Shakespeare’s, “precious stone set in a silver sea … this England”.
Less profoundly, but to suggest ways in which we might opt for an Australia Day that celebrates something unique but unpretentious about us, I commend December 24, Christmas Eve.
It is the day (in 2018) on which the uniquely Australian Nick Kyrgios, at home in our proud nation’s capital city, was bitten by one of Australia’s uniquely venomous spiders.
Right now we are a little too close to this event to appreciate the mythical, symbolic significance it promises to have 100 years hence.
But think about it. Kyrgios, doomed by his tormented personality never to do his tennis genius justice, is destined to be a tragic figure. Shakespeare, if he were with us today, would find the tragedy of Kyrgios irresistible. He, Kyrgios, as well as being so like a tennis-playing Hamlet, represents the Australian people’s tragically optimistic expectations of their sportsmen and sportswomen, our forlorn national wait for the second coming of a Don Bradman.
Then, that Kyrgios’ career should have been so cruelly disrupted by an Australian spider! Kyrgios, envenomed, and in his own words “rusty”, limped, blaming the spider, to early defeat at the Brisbane International, and, still rusty, had his (and the nation’s) Australian Open hopes dashed by redback-triggered unfitness.
I’m reminded of Dame Edna Everage’s observation that when an Aussie swimmer is taken by a shark it should be some patriotic consolation to the victim, and then to his or her grieving loved ones, that it is at least “a very Australian death”. Kyrgios’ career-impeding spider bite was a very Australian misfortune.
And it really is the case (I have just heard a zoologist explaining it on ABC Radio National) that Australia’s venomous creatures (especially our snakes and spiders) have evolved to be uniquely, spellbindingly venomous. We, human Australians, should be very proud of them.
Had Kyrgios only been bitten by a dog this story would have no legend power. As it is, though, with a unique Australian bitten by a uniquely Australian spider in Australia’s capital city and on Christmas Eve (what an Australia Day it could be!) we see the makings of a magical, powerful national legend.
