Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!

Oi! Oi! Oi!!

For all of you who live overseas, today is Australia Day!! And we have had a fabulous day :)

We stayed at my father-in-law's last night (after a late night dessert of pavlova) so we could get up and go to the Big Aussie Breakfast put on by his local shire. Lots of the shires/councils do them, but he has been a councillor for the last few years so going to support him being a part of the community has turned into a bit of a tradition for us.

Lazy day at home. With it being over 40 degrees Celsius , this seemed like a sensible plan. Then we cooked up hamburgers with patties in the shape of Australia and went to the fireworks. Complete with Australian t-shirts, tattoos and glow sticks of course. It is one of my favourite days of the year. It isn't always the same, but is always filled with catching up with friends and family and is a chance to remember how lucky we are.

So why the mixed feelings?

A very short legal/social history: 26 January is the date that Australia was first claimed as terra nullis, an empty land. A claim which totally ignored the Aboriginal people and which was later found to be invalid by the High Court of Australia (which has impacted on land rights, but that is a whole other story I am not going into here!!)

A lot of Aboriginal people feel Australia Day is really invasion day. I can't say I blame them. There is a lot of bad history about how Aboriginal people were treated once Australia was colonised. Some of which occurred during living people's memories.

This year there has also been media stories about correlations between people who fly the flag on their car and people who are racist. Sensationalist journalism, but of course it has sparked a whole heap of racist and offensive posting on facebook about migrants (and really at the end of the day we were all migrants or convicts originally) and refugees.

So mixed feelings. I have to admit I would celebrate with cleaner conscious if it was on a different day. That said, I use today as a time to talk to my girls about our past. And a day to talk with them about some of the less pleasant aspects. Also of course some of the nicer parts! Why my family came to Australia. Well my mum's side anyway. We don't actually know when or why my dad's side came to Australia. Last year we watched a Citizenship ceremony which I think was a good experience for them.

All this Australiana brings funny moments too. We were singing Australian songs today. One of them, which they all do know, was 'Waltzing Matilda'. The song has some very old Australian words in it which do not come up in everyday conversation. Ok really most of them don't come up in conversation ever and we mustn't have sung it in a while so they asked for a translation of what it all meant. Basically it is about a sheep stealer who jumps into a lake and drowns rather then be arrested. There was a long pause at the end of this. Followed by the next song request!