Today (February 13, 2025), MMTed releases Episode 11 in the Second Season of our Manga…
Recent extended discussion with RadioMMT – Part 1
It is a public holiday in Australia today celebrating our national day – the day that the colonial powers of Britain first decided to set us up as a penal colony because they had run out of prison space in the old country due to the massive incarceration rates following the enclosures. The impoverished small scale farmers who relied on the open ‘commons’ to survive were dispossessed by the privatisation of the communal lands. They were then criminalised as a result of their poverty and starvation and shipped off to what is now Australia. A sorry start to white settlement. However, the country was settled at least 30 thousand years prior to white settlement by the first nation peoples. They call today ‘invasion day’ as do the whites who are sympathetic to their oppression (such as me). Today is thus a highly conflicted one – big street marches recognising the invasion, competing with traditional white Australia Day events, and, then, being challenged more recently by the so-called March for Australia movement rallies which are a front for neo-nazis who hate immigration and most nearly everything else. The call to abandon today as our national day and instead shift it to a date that would not cause the first nations people such angst falls on deaf ears. Anyway, today I am not writing any more but am promoting a recent discussion I had with the RadioMMT program on Melbourne’s community radio station 3CR. I will be back on Thursday with some analysis of the upcoming Japanese national election, which is providing lots of opportunities for education.
This program on – RadioMMT – which is a weekly program on Melbourne’s community radio station 3CR was broadcast on January 23, 2026.
The host is Kevin Gaynor and we recorded a two-part discussion the week prior.
You can listen to Part 1 – HERE.
You can download Part 1 – HERE (depending on your browser settings).
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2026 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
Place yourself in my position. I’ve long considered Australia Day to be Invasion Day, and still do. In 2019, I applied for my adoption papers, having been adopted at birth. After close to a twelve month wait, I received my papers and learned who my birthmother was and that my birthfather was an American serviceman (USAF) posted to Australia during the Vietnam War. My sister (also adopted by who I still consider to be Mum and Dad) gave me an ancestry.com kit as a birthday present. I plugged in the info I had on my birthmother and discovered I am a descendant of two First Fleet convicts who were sent to Norfolk Island (a party of just 24 people, fifteen of which were convicts) just three weeks after arriving at Sydney Cove.
Invasion implies intent, so I consider my convict ancestors to be unwilling invaders. Nathaniel Lucas always professed his innocence and Olivia Gascoyne was an ‘illegitimate’ daughter of an English midlands’ aristocratic who worked as a servant (there were many like her) until sacked to make room for British soldiers returning from the war for US independence with their tails between their legs.
People think I should, as much as anyone, celebrate Australia Day. I thank my good fortune but see it as a disaster for Aboriginal people who had successfully occupied the Australian continent for tens of thousands of years.
In my opinion, Australia Day should be May 27. When I say this, most Australians have no idea why. Believe it not (I wouldn’t expect non-Australians to know this), Aboriginal people weren’t even counted in the census, let alone had right to vote. That changed following a referendum on 27 May, 1967. Only then did Australia become, in a formal sense, a truly inclusive country. I say ‘formal sense’ because Aboriginal people are still horribly discriminated against and more institutionally deprived than any other group of people in Australia. A national disgrace that is overlooked at so-called Australia Day celebrations.
Do we really need any sort of ‘Australia day?’
Isn’t it just another aspect of governments creating mythologies around which to try and construct a national identity?
A propaganda exercise, in true Bernay’s tradition, to give to credence to what is essentially an “imagined community?”
(as per Benedict Anderson and others).
Why is it that most of the attempts to foster such a syndrome are centered on violent events?
Take WW1, as an obvious example;
historian Clare Wright (You Daughters Of Freedom: The Australians Who Won The Vote And Inspired The World) suggests that the onset of WW1 “was the death of a nation we were on the way to becoming.”
Graeme D: Probably not. It wouldn’t bother me if we didn’t. I suggested May 27 on the assumption that if there was an Australia Day, I couldn’t think of a better date. The fact that so few Australians recognise the significance of 27 May, 1967, says a lot. A day we had to have but best forgotten, along with its significance.
Where is part 2?