Australia Day

Vanguard February 2013
Editorial

On Australia Day we reflect on the brutal dispossession and suppression of the Aboriginal people from the time of the British colonial invasion in 1788. It’s a day to honour the resilience and fearless resistance of Aboriginal people to colonial oppression, and their unending struggles for genuine Sovereignty and Treaty. Their struggle is an important part of our overall struggle for Australian independence.

It is also time to show pride and confidence in the long tradition of Australia’s organised working class struggle.  Many generations of migrants and refugees from all corners of the world contributed to the creation of the wealth in this country from their hard labour.  On Australia Day we point to a people’s vision for the Aboriginal and working people.

For the Aboriginal people 26^th January is Invasion Day. It is a remembrance day of deep sorrow and pain for Australia’s Indigenous people. For more than 40,000 years, Aboriginal people were the sole custodians of the land and all its natural wealth, which they respected and protected for future generations. It was the Aboriginal people’s main source of their material and spiritual way of life, the long, rich and proud culture and traditions.

It was this relationship to the country and protection of the natural environment by the Aboriginal people that the colonisers and imperialists have been trying to wipe out with the successive government policies (Labor and Liberal) that serve the foreign and local mining monopolies and multinationals.

Despite these attempts to annihilate the Aboriginal people’s sovereignty, they never gave up and their resistance continues today. The present struggles against the racist Intervention and seizure of their mineral rich lands by mining monopolies are not deterring Aboriginal communities from continuing the fight. They have wide support from many Australians.

Australia Day is also a time to reflect on the first outbreaks of class struggle by the British and Irish convicts exiled to Australia for committing crimes of poverty. They were the poor and destitute of the Industrial Revolution and the expanding bourgeois capitalist class. Convicts were used as slaves and were put to hard labour in the new British colony. They cleared the land and built the first infrastructure for the British aristocracy and bourgeois capitalist class. Their conditions and treatment by the British military were harsh. Many rebelled and developed a very healthy disdain for bourgeois class authority. Convicts and political exiles laid the foundations for the class militancy and the independent spirit of the future working class in Australia.

This militant working class tradition and consciousness took up the first ideals and hopes for socialism that later grew into the scientific socialism and was embraced by many in the working class movement.