The date of Australia Day

is under "debate" again. It's Australia Day on the 26th January and this year the demands to "change the date" appear to be more strident - at least in the media.
I have my doubts as to whether the vast majority of the population is interested or cares in the least. It's a holiday, an excuse not to go to work, an excuse to have a BBQ and a beer. Ask people what the day is supposed to commemorate and many of them would have only a vague idea. 
I am not too sure what it is supposed to commemorate myself. I am not sure that you can have a "national" day in a country which is so determinedly "multi-cultural". It seems slightly ridiculous.
I suppose we should really be celebrating "Federation Day" - the day on which the states came together under the Australian Constitution in 1901. That might make more sense.
But both the major political parties say there are no plans to change the date.
One of the reasons put forward for changing it is that some indigenous Australians claim it is "Invasion Day".  They are in the minority but they are likely to be heard. Such claims make good media copy. 
Was it an invasion? I suppose it depends on how you interpret the word. Yes, a small fleet landed and a small number of people settled permanently. Yes, they took over a very small part of a vast land, a small part that belonged to someone else. We now see that as wrong but, at the time, it was thought that the land did not "belong" to anyone.  It wasn't until the "Mabo" (Mabo v Queensland (No 2) case in 1992 that land ownership by the indigenous people of Australia and the Torres Strait was recognised. It was a complex case and the decision is a complex one. It wasn't simply, "Yes, you own that and we took it away." The decision in the case actually took more than twelve months to be handed down. There had been years of work prior to that.
But what would have happened if the First Fleet had not landed. A former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, recently suggested that the colonisation of the country was a good thing for the indigenous people. He was promptly howled down. Statements were made about the theft of the country, "massacres", "genocide" and more.
Such statements show little understanding or knowledge of the history of the country. I know people who still believe that "measles infested blankets" were deliberately handed out to the local tribes. Historians have been able to find no evidence of that. There has been argument over whether small pox or chicken pox caused many of the deaths but the idea that it was a deliberate act has never been proven. What is much more likely is that the local tribes were simply not immune to the diseases brought by the First Fleet and that it was the highly contagious chicken pox virus which was responsible. It would have taken just one infectious person from the First Fleet in close contact to be responsible.
If it had not happened when it did then colonisation would have happened soon after. It might have been the Dutch or the French or perhaps people from Indonesia or China who landed and laid claim to what was a sparsely populated land mass. There were perhaps thousands of small tribes, some of whom had connections to others but whose languages and cultures differed. It wasn't a unified country with a common language and culture. 
A lot of that has been lost and humanity is the poorer for it but, for the most part, it wasn't deliberate. 
It certainly changed the way of life of the indigenous peoples but trying to hold present day people responsible for the acts of others more than 200 years ago  isn't helpful.
Teaching that view of the past and demanding a change in the date for those reasons isn't helping anyone.