What’s in a day?

Great Australians celebrate Australia Day.

Dear reader, we at PCbyCP are flabbergasted at all the kerfuffle about Australia Day. What is all the fuss about? And why does Fremantle, host city to the glorious Americas Cup defence want to get itself involved in such un-patriotic grandstanding?

We’re confused, and we know that you must be as bewildered as we are. So for posterity’s sake we give you this abridged history, courtesy of the IPA and the Blainey Institute of Australian History. The true story…as acknowledged by our most famous Australians, Clive James, Barry Humphries, and Germane Greer who from preference don’t live here.

Civilisation

It all began aeons ago, way back in 1770. Captain Cook landed on the east coast of Australia at Botany Bay and proclaimed this land for Britain and the Empire. He made the observation that no one else lived here. Or if there were people they didn’t realise the value of “ Real Estate”, which by inference means they weren’t really people anyway. Six years later America proclaimed its independence from the Empire and in 1788, with no alternate place to send their convicts, Australia was chosen as the perfect place. On January 26 1788, the first fleet arrived, and from the stinking bowels of those rancid, fetid hulls, came the convicts. And in that instant Australia was civilised!!

Since that glorious day in 1788, when the convicts were whipped into action and started clearing the wilderness, we have seen great cities rise from the scrub, and this grim, remote inhospitable land has been tamed with daytime television, shopping malls and the bounty of Real Estate. For a while there were some industrious people who developed manufacturing and had some pretty bright ideas, but successive governments showed them the errors of their ways. Consequently, Australia in 2017 is very firmly all about Real Estate, some mining and lots of jobs involving not thinking too much at all about the future.

‘Civilising’, and teaching respect for “Real Estate” as the underlying principle of a great nation.

This is what makes Australia the “Lucky Country” there’s ‘wealth of soil and bounty for toil’. However, the best thing is, if you don’t want to toil, you can just sit on a piece of real estate for years and years and make tons of money without having to do anything. That’s why our politicians love real estate, and they’re so terribly keen on it. Ironically, ordinary folk can’t ever afford any. But they’re losers. And Australians who love sport, can’t stand losers, unless of course they’re Anzacs.

Who are Anzac’s you may ask?. They are the engine room of the Australian soul. They nobly kill themselves in other people’s wars and for all the waste and loss of life, they celebrate in a curious ritual every year the day that marks the anniversary of a particularly stupid fragment of imperial history. Australia loves it’s past, it proves that we’re still profoundly colonial and don’t like to think for ourselves. It’s called the ‘cultural cringe’.

There are rewards for enforcing the cultural cringe.

We have very little faith in ourselves and because of the insecurity, we implore other people in the world community to take us seriously and try and pretend we’re not shallow, insecure, smug little property owners who are terribly interested in interest rates, superannuation and share portfolios rather the thinking beyond the square. And that’s a good policy, because thinking within the square is safe and reassuring. That’s why out current PM talks of innovation and ideas booms, all safely contained within the square.

Once there were other Australians, they occupied this land for fifty thousand years and kept it intact by observing the ecology and diversity of its landscapes, but happily they are just a footnote in the glorious history of Australia. Since settlement we have systematically erased them as people, and we’re still at it ensuring they are pilloried, imprisoned and impoverished. And it makes us proud, Such is the burden of civilising. There is no day to commemorate their defeat as they weren’t really a country in the first place. And besides they were savages. And some of them, ‘trouble makers’ can’t get over it. That’s because they’re underserving, and wont be in line for Australia Day Honours, which recognises truly great Australians for just doing their jobs. They’re anointed by Her Majesty the Queen. Who doesn’t live here either.