In Australia public holidays can be a source of sometimes bitter conflict, rather than national unity

Mark Brolly in Melbourne

For a people with a reputation for being laid-back, Australians get in an awful twist about many of their public holidays - sometimes with good reason.

Australians are settling into their working and studying year after their summer holidays, which begin at Christmas and unofficially end on Australia Day, 26 January.

Australia Day marks the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Harbour in 1788 and the proclamation of a British penal colony under Governor Arthur Phillip. But this year, on the other side of the country in the Western Australian port city of Fremantle, the local council decided to move its celebrations to 28 January for a "culturally-inclusive alternative" called "One Day".

Understandably, given all it meant for them - dispossession, disease and the destruction of much of their lands and culture - Aboriginal people have long protested about Australia Day. At least as far back as the 150th anniversary in 1938, some Aboriginal leaders have marked 26 January as a "Day of Mourning". To many of them and to what seems to be an increasing number of non-Aboriginal Australians, "Invasion Day", "Survival Day" and "Amnesia Day" seem a more appropriate moniker than Australia Day.

An Arrernte woman from Central Australia now living in Melbourne, Celeste Liddle wrote on the Jesuit-run website Eureka Street that the things Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were fighting for decades ago were very similar to the things they are still fighting for now.

"Australia is therefore not a country which has acknowledged and rectified its history; rather it seems content to reinforce its amnesia," Ms Liddle wrote. "I can only conclude from all this that changing the date would be little more than celebrating the invasion and genocide of Indigenous people on another day. It's therefore unlikely that I will be able to stop protesting this celebration, regardless of the day it's held upon.

"Let's instead start coming to terms with our past. Let's rectify all the injustice, get real on questions of cultural respect and reparations, and create, rather than enforce, a unified country which can move forward. Let's really start working towards a day we can all celebrate."

Jesuit and Eureka Street's contributing editor, Fr Andrew Hamilton, wrote on 23 January that in the Australian cultural myth, "holidays are times for forgetting — good Aussies bury the claims the world, history and the family make on us under a pile of tinnies shared with mates".

"Whenever it is celebrated Australia Day should evoke memories that make us thankful and memories that make us ashamed. Its celebration should also encourage us to reform what has been bent."

Meanwhile Anzac Day, the anniversary of the British-led assault on the Dardanelles on 25 April 1915, is another day that arouses diverse sentiments. Some still argue that it marks the "true" birth of the nation, even though the six British colonies had federated -- after a popular vote -- 14 years earlier. Critics have argued that it celebrates war rather than peace, while others still question why Gallipoli holds an elevated place in the nation's memory when 45,000 of the almost 60,000 Australian deaths in the Great War occurred on the Western Front or with the casualties in battles much closer to home in the Second World War and subsequent conflicts.

Then there are the holidays with their origins in Christianity. Easter provides Aussies with their longest weekend, Good Friday and Easter Monday both being public holidays.

As the Senate wound up its year in Canberra on 1 December last year, the leader of the Australian Greens, Senator Richard Di Natale, delivered his greetings. But there was to be no "Buon Natale" from the good Senator, who was educated at a Christian Brothers college in Melbourne. He couldn't bring himself to mention Christmas, instead offering: "... In the true spirit of a non-religious, nondenominational greeting, let me wish you 'Happy Festivus', everybody."
 
She's (not quite) apples over Brexit
Australians were probably as surprised as most people outside the UK about the Brexit vote last June, though Mr Trump trumped that five months later.

Still, the "Leave" decision was a good deal less traumatic for many Australians than the UK's entry to the Common Market, as it then was in 1973. Many Australian farmers were aghast at the loss of preferential access to their oldest market, Britain: in Tasmania, the Apple Isle, a government-backed Tree Pull Scheme reduced the production of apples by half and the number of orchardists by 700. Now, in a sign of how much of Australia's prosperity depends on Asia, about a third of Tasmania's apples are exported to Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines, while another quarter are sold to the big cities on the mainland -- Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The rest are used within Tasmania or for processing.

The aforementioned Fr Andrew Hamilton wrote as Britain voted last June that the founders of post-war European Union -- Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi -- were determined to ensure that there would be no third European War, and so to avoid the conditions that had led to war.

"They were also linked by a deep knowledge of European history and by an informed respect for its Christian roots. Their opposition to a politics of exclusion and their principles of cooperation and peace built on unity resonated with the Catholic social tradition. “ Hamilton reminded his readers.

In 1973, Australian Catholics had much to celebrate, even as they digested and adjusted to the changes and consequences of Vatican II. In February, Melbourne hosted the 40th International Eucharistic Congress - a formative event in the life of this correspondent, then a teenage altar server - and the following month, for the first and only time, the archbishops of both Sydney and Melbourne, James Freeman and James Knox, were made cardinals. Forty-four years later, Britain prepares to stand apart from the Continent again and the Australian Church prepares to digest and adjust to the changes and consequences of a searing public inquiry into its darker history.
 
No time to rest as Commission's end nears
The three-week Catholic "wrap-up" hearing of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is due to conclude this week. But as Australia's Anglicans, who face their own final hearing next month, have found out in the past week with the release on consecutive days of three reports highly critical of some of their leaders and processes, there is little time out of the spotlight with this four-year inquiry, which has another 10 months to run.

Reports on the Catholic Church and its institutions in Ballarat, in which Ballarat-born Cardinal George Pell was the highest-profile witness, Melbourne, Maitland-Newcastle, Armidale and Parramatta are among those yet to be released before the Commission ends its work with its final report in December.

A big unknown is who and how many Catholic leaders and other church people may face prosecution. The Commission had made 1899 referrals to authorities, including police, as of 1 February as a result of its inquiries, including from more than 6400 private sessions between commissioners and survivors of child sexual abuse as well as from its 50 public hearings so far.

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