From Eye on Australia (Geoffrey Blainey, 1991) p134-7
They will all be there, on Australia Day. Coming from unknown graves in the bush, coming from Gallipoli and the Burma railway, coming from suburban cemeteries and even the ocean floor, they will stand unseen on the shores of Sydney Harbour on January 26.
A nation is shaped by politicians and builders and inventors, but it is made by the millions of everyday people who bring in the harvest, bake the bread, give birth to children and hope that their children will live a fuller life. Those past Australians, now forgotten, will find their way to Sydney in the coming week. ‘
Men who cut the first tracks into dense forest will come just for the day. “Philosopher” Smith, who, in 1871 carried his supplies on his back and found, far from the Tasmanian coast, the rich tin of Mt Bischoff, will surely come. “I cannot remember ever hearing him laugh,” his son once said. Perhaps the philosopher will laugh this Australia Day.
A young nation wins a high standard of living only if tens of thousands of its people give, in effort and ingenuity, a little more than duty demands.
Chinese shepherd Yen Soon, minding his Hock in Australia on the morning of Black Thursday 1851, stood with his sheep when a huge bushfire raced towards him. It is said that he “stayed too long amongst them and was suffocated by the dense smoke”. He will breathe the Sydney sea air on Australia Day.
Thompson and McGregor set up their Times Bakery at Gulgong goldfield, NSW, in the early 18708 and arose in the darkness each morning to light the fires and knead the dough. They will visit every harbourside suburb on Australia Day because they stand together perhaps more credit-worthy than in real life – on the top of our $10 note.
Long before the painters of the Heidelberg School began to paint bleached grass and blue ranges, people stood in the doorways of bush huts and learned to appreciate landscape, light and vegetation that at first could seem harsh and even bewildering. They will sit alone in the scrub on Sydney’s headlands, away from the tiled suburbs, on Australia Day.
Followers of various codes of conduct will find a vantage point and not argue. No busybody will tell the lady who won ”the married women’s race” at the first Mt Isa picnic sports that she was not really married. The mayor of gold-rush Leonora in Western Australia will read the Koran without interruption. But the first mayor of Moonta in South Australia will pretend to be absent, just to reassert that wonderful dictum that “you have not travelled until you’ve been to Moonta”.
Invisible, above the cliffs of North Head, the men of Gallipoli will see the sun rise again. Many had spent their last hour climbing steep slopes at sunrise. What will they say if they learn that their “war to end all wars” was followed, two decades later, by a more terrible war? Disillusion as well as triumph will walk on the water on Australia Day.
For 24 hours a host of Aboriginals will speak languages now dead. At nightfall their bark canoes will rock on the waves, but the fire traditionally glowing on a pad of clay on the bottom of each canoe will go out at midnight.
Around the harbour the nation’s symbol-makers will find a place. John West will be there: congregational minister from Launceston, he was the first to place the Southern Cross on an important Australian flag the banner of the proud alliance which in 1850 fought to end the transportation of convicts to Australia.
Young Evans, the Box Hill schoolboy who in 1901 was one of five who designed the new Australian flag, will sit near Mr West. At night they will assure themselves that their constellation dearer to Australians of earlier generations still sits low in the sky. Unlike most of today’s Australians they will know where to look.
Among the millions who will come without an invitation to “the celebration of a nation” will be Simpson’s donkey, the Colt from Old Regret, broken-down dray horses, Clydesdales, camels, Jersey cows, sheep dogs, australorps, a proud Camden ram, and even Mathew Flinders’ cat, the charming Trim who will purr once it sniffs the salt air again.
We forget that working animals as well as people made this nation. On Australia Day we will faintly hear the clip-clop of Edward Dyson’s old horse. We were taught to chant in school that “he’s an old grey horse, with his head bowed sadly”, but on this day his head will be high.
You will not recognise them when the camera zooms on the spectators but they will be there: Jack Dunn of Nevertire, Jack Howe with his sheep shears, the tent-hospital nurse, the lighthouse keeper’s wife from Torres Strait, and the women who held the big teapots at Albury Station in the days of “all change here”.
For half an instant you might almost glimpse the wheatbelt pastor who knew the Old Testament by heart, the stoker from the SS Orungal, the Aboriginal cricketers who toured England in 1868, Granny Smith who will dress herself in green, and the drover’s wife with her four dried-up-looking children. One of those children, the youngest, could still be alive, her life encompassing exactly half of our nation’s history.
They will all be there, somewhere around the harbour.
We should cup hand to ear, for that great cloud of witnesses will try to speak on behalf of earlier generations who probably were more successful than our own.
Weekend Australian, 23-24 January 1988
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