The Australia day date controversy resolved (P#22)
To resolve this controversy, we only need to Google 3 dates from history:
1. Australian nationality came into existence when the Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1948 took effect and became law on 26th January 1949.
2. Captain Cook landed in Sydney on the 28/29th April 1770.
3. The first fleet arrived in Botany Bay on 18th January 1788, with the last of the 11 ships arriving on 20th.
So, 26th January 1949 has nothing at all to do with Captain Cook! It is only close to the first fleet arrival date. It is the day in 1948 when we all became Australian citizens. Before then, all people living in Australia, including Aborigines, were called ‘British Subjects’ and had to travel on British passports and fight in British wars. Consequently, new Australians receive their citizenship on this date. The Act also gave Aboriginal Australians full protection under Australian Law for the first time. It is therefore an appropriate date for both immigrant and indigenous communities to celebrate Australian citizenship.
Calling 26 January Invasion Day is just plain wrong. How foolish we would be to go to all the unnecessary anguish and expense of changing that based on incorrect information! Continuing to perpetuate this mistake would be turning misinformation into belief! Just because the Sydney spin doctors of the day spun Captain Cook into it to give it more traction, doesn’t mean we should blindly follow their lead! This is a deliberate mistake made years ago that our media could easily clear up now by simply publicising this.
It’s the date of ‘Invasion Day’ that is historically incorrect and needs to be changed. It could be on either 28/29 April (1770) when Cook claimed it, or on 18 – 20 January (1788) when the first settlers arrived, albeit that they were predominantly a bunch of convicts in chains.
This post condenses my previous posts on other platforms, which drew from a 2023 post by a Peter Lee, and which the simple Google date checks above were able to verify.
Amendment of 11/7/2025
While the first fleet arrived in Botany Bay between 18 and 20 January 1788, https://guides.sl.nsw.gov.au/convicts-bound-for-australia/first_fleet tells us that the settlement was shifted north to Port Jackson and the ships arrived there on 26 January. So, it is the settlement date that has been celebrated, not the landing date, with which it has been conflated.
Peter Albion has informed me of https://www.commongrace.org.au/jan26_history which says:
the earliest references to celebrating January 26 were in almanacs and the Sydney Gazette dating around 1804. In Sydney, celebratory drinking, and anniversary dinners later became customary, before Governor Macquarie acknowledged the day officially as a public holiday on the thirtieth anniversary in 1818.
… In 1938, while state premiers celebrated the Sesquicentenary together in Sydney, Aboriginal leaders gathered for a Day of Mourning to protest their mistreatment by white Australians and to seek full citizen rights.
… This same year, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples renamed Australia Day, ‘Invasion Day’ and declared their opposition to the celebrations of 26 January 1988, with posters that declared ‘White Australia has a Black History — Don’t Celebrate 1988’ and ‘Australia Day = Invasion Day 1988’.
Peter also pointed out that although the Australian Nationality and Citizenship Act was proclaimed on 26 January 1949, that was simply because that was the date that nationality was being celebrated, but it didn’t take full effect until 1984. https://www.naa.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-05/fs-187-citizenship-in-australia.pdf says:
Throughout the 1960s, Australian citizens were still required to declare their nationality as British. The term ‘Australian nationality’ had no official recognition or meaning until the Act was amended in 1969 and renamed the Citizenship Act. This followed a growing sense of Australian nationalism and the declining importance for Australians of the British Empire. In 1973 the Act was renamed the Australian Citizenship Act. It was not until 1984 that Australian citizens ceased to be British subjects.
So, notwithstanding these corrections and additions, it seems that Australia Day and Invasion Day have both been attributed to the wrong date. This would seem to render arguments over the date futile and not worth the expense of changing. Better to be actually doing something about increasing recognition and acceptance of as well as providing support for our original people that would lead to improvements in their living conditions, health and well-being. Hopefully, eventually, the descendants of the dispossessed of England and Ireland who were forced to dispossess the originals here will come to accept and celebrate a day of national shared history.