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NLA News - home June 2005 Volume XV Number 10
click to enlarge
Statue of Sir Henry Parkes, Centennial Park, Sydney, 1901
From album 321/5
gelatin silver photographs;
21 x 25 cm or smaller
Part of Australian Federation
celebrations, Sydney, 1901
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an13143099-14

Commemorating the Nation
in the National Library of Australia

Roslyn Russell looks at memorabilia in the Library to see how Australia celebrates its significant anniversaries

The ‘imagined community’ that is the nation of Australia began to celebrate its existence well before it was constituted at Federation. Citizens of the developing colonies thought of themselves as ‘Australians’, and celebrated the moment of their country’s foundation, on 26 January 1788, as ‘Australia Day’ from the mid-nineteenth century.

However, some celebrations of this date were larger and more significant than the rest. They occurred at 50-year intervals—the Centenary in 1888, the Sesquicentenary in 1938 and the Bicentenary in 1988. And the organisers of each celebration chose a different thematic focus around which to create a national mood, and to evoke national aspirations. All of these anniversaries were contested by particular groups which considered that there was scant reason for celebration of this particular date.

The National Library of Australia holds a rich collection of material relating to all the significant anniversaries. Through this, it is possible to demonstrate the fluctuating fortunes of the celebration of Australia Day at these key times, and to participate in the prevailing national moods created around them. Beneath the effusions of national rhetoric, the banners and posters, the photographs and videos, the surrounding graphic styles of three different eras reveal the ways in which Australians represented themselves to themselves, and to the wider world.

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Kwinana Home Support Service card with the message inside ‘Bicentennial Greetings 1788–1988
Pictures Collection
nla.aus-vn1711918-1

The year that British settlement in Australia achieved its centenary—1888—was marked by celebratory events in New South Wale and Victoria. At the time, Henry Parkes, the premier of the original colony of New South Wales managed to get the other colonies offside by proposing that his should assume the name of ‘Australia’. The centenary was commemorated in New South Wales by the creation of Centennial Park, which 3 years later would become the venue for the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia, a goal towards which Parkes had striven for years.

The Centenary was celebrated unevenly across the continent. South Australia did not bother. Victoria and New South Wales shared the celebratory burden, with the southern colony offering to host a Centennial International Exhibition in the grand building constructed for its first international exhibition in 1880–81 (now Australia’s only built heritage site listed on UNESCO’s World Heritage Register).

The New South Wales Court in the exhibition, given pride of place in the building, featured an enormous bust of Captain James Cook, who was hailed in the rhetoric surrounding the exhibition as the man who had brought civilisation to the continent of Australia. There was also a tableau of wax figures depicting Cook’s landing at Botany Bay. As historian David Dunstan wrote in his history of the Exhibition Building, Victorian Icon (1996), ‘In presenting Cook as the founder it was possible to gloss over the fact that the colony had been established as a penal settlement’. The stain of the convicts still besmirched nineteenth-century Australia.

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Captain Cook’s Landing at Botany, A.D. 1770 1872
col. lithograph; 36.0 x 46.5 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an7890396

Nevertheless, a pamphlet held in the National Library’s Special Collections shows that the New South Wales Commissioner, R. Burdett-Smith, was anxious to see that the other ‘founding father’ of white Australia was not forgotten in the rush to eulogise Cook. At a meeting of the Centennial Celebration Commission on 20 January 1880, Burdett-Smith proposed a resolution: ‘That in the opinion of the Commission some public celebration should be effected in honour of its first Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, RN’. Speaking to his proposal, the New South Wales Commissioner declared:

What time could be more appropriate than during the celebration of our first centenary to do meet justice to the memory of … Captain Arthur Phillip … the illustrious man who, a hundred years ago on January 26 next, unfurled the British standard on our shores, and mainly laid the foundations of social life under circumstances of great difficulty and perplexity, requiring much prudence, forethought, self-denial and courage.

Burdett-Smith delicately avoided mentioning the fact that Phillip governed a colony composed mainly of felons transported from Britain. The Bulletin was not so circumspect: a cartoon published at the time of the Centenary showed a convict in leg irons dancing to the piping of a military guard in 1788; and an Australian bushman dancing to the accordion tune of the imperial capitalist, John Bull, in 1888. According to The Bulletin, Australia was still well under British control.

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Interior of the New South Wales Court
albumen photograph;
14.6 x 20.0 cm
Part of: Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne, 1888
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an24793708
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Cover of Arthur Phillip Memorial Address, 1934

By 1938, the sesquicentenary of British settlement, any perceived slights to Governor Arthur Phillip were well and truly being redressed. The first governor was the centrepiece of the celebrations, and each phase of his arrival on the shores of Australia was celebrated and re-enacted. The National Library holds the program for the commemoration of Phillip’s landing at Botany Bay on 18 January 1888, celebrated at Captain Cook’s landing place at Kurnell. The Governor of New South Wales presided over the event, and read an ‘appropriate passage’ from The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay, detailing ‘an interview with the natives’:

They were all armed, but on seeing the Governor approach with signs of friendship, alone and unarmed, they readily returned his confidence by laying down their weapons … The presents offered by their new visitors were all readily accepted, nor did any kind of disagreement arise while the ships remained in Botany Bay. This very pleasing effect was produced in no small degree by the personal address as well as by the great care and attention of the Governor.

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Two men standing on a rock with the city on the background, Waverley and Randwick, 1886
albumen photograph;
image 22.2 x 26.2 cm
In a series of views of Centennial Park in the process of construction, 1886
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23620657

Once the premier had spoken, the massed band of the Royal Australian Navy played, among other tunes, the ‘Serenade’ from The Student Prince by Romberg, and the ‘March’ from Aida by Verdi, followed by ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and ‘God Save the King’.

The year before, on 3 June 1937, the Commonwealth of Australia had erected a monument to Phillip’s memory in Bath Abbey, in the city where he died on 3 August 1814. Details of the service, and other pamphlets commemorating Phillip’s residences in Bath and London, are held in the Library’s Special Collections. In one of these is recorded the service held to dedicate the Phillip Memorial. The dedicatory prayer concludes, somewhat surprisingly, in an expression of contrition at possible misdeeds perpetrated throughout the course of white settlement: ‘Forgive, O Lord, the faults, neglects and errors of the past in the course of our Empire development and grant us wisdom to fulfil Thy laws of eternal righteousness, through Jesus Christ our Lord’.

Those damaged by that settlement process were beginning to make their feelings known. While some Aboriginal people from country New South Wales were co-opted to take part in a re-enactment of Phillip’s landing at Botany Bay, others banded together to observe a Day of Mourning. The first stirrings of the movement for Aboriginal rights were aligned with the celebration of the sesquicentenary of white occupation of Australia.

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Peter Dodds McCormick (1834?–1916)
Advance Australia Fair
[Sydney]: W.H. Paling & Co.,
[190-?]
Music Collection,
nla.mus-an6012238
Henry Marsh
The Anniversary Polka
Sydney: H. Marsh & Co.?, 1853
Music Collection,
nla.mus-an6442810
National Airs, arranged for the piano by Roger Cameron
Dunedin, N.Z.: Terry’s Book and Music Stores, 20th century
Music Collection,
nla.mus-an5618627

By 1988, this low-key protest had become a far more substantial movement. While Australia entered a year-long jamboree of festivities for its bicentenary, on 26 January the nation’s Indigenous people commemorated Survival Day, with a march described as ‘the biggest gathering of Aboriginal people in their 50 000 year history’. It culminated in Belmore Park near Central Railway. Wendy Bacon, in a pamphlet in the Library’s collection titled Aboriginal Perspectives on the Bicentenary, published by the ACT Schools Authority (1988), noted that ‘For once, white supporters also gathered for the first time in tens of thousands and stood back as the traditional leaders from Northern Australia wove their way into the park’.

The Bicentenary avoided the insensitivity of tying the celebration to a British naval officer such as Cook and Phillip, or an event such as the arrival of the First Fleet (although there was a ‘Tall Ships’ celebration on Sydney Harbour anyway). Rather, the twin themes of the Bicentenary were the celebration of the land of Australia and its cultural diversity. The Australian Bicentennial Authority’s stylised ribbon logo, with green, yellow, white and black or blue stripes, became a familiar sight around the nation as preparations for the anniversary unfolded throughout the 1980s. The whole country was invited to a huge party that was televised around the nation as fireworks exploded over Sydney Harbour.

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Cover of Aboriginal Perspectives of the Bicentenary: A Collection of Papers (Canberra: ACT Schools Authority, 1988)
Courtesy of ACT Government
click to enlarge
Don McMurdo (1930–2001)
[Fireworks over the Sydney Opera
House, Japan Week, 988?, no.2]
col. slide; 5.3 x 5.3 cm.
Pictures Collection
nla.pic-an23332724

The 1988 Bicentenary resulted in a number of initiatives of lasting value to Australia. A bicentennial exhibition toured Australia, many communities gained new facilities with bicentenary funding, and historical societies and local museums were beneficiaries of the anniversary celebrations. At a national level, the National Library hosted the Historic Records Search, and a large team of historians based in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University produced the multi-volume Australians: A Historical Library.

The papers of the Australian Bicentennial Authority are held in the National Library in 36 boxes, along with posters. Some of the images generated by the Bicentenary can be viewed online at <nla.gov.au/nla.aus-vn1711918>. Since that time, Australia Day has, like ANZAC Day, been celebrated on the day it falls during the week, rather than as a Monday public holiday. Citizenship ceremonies are held then, and Australia Day honours are announced. While 26 January is still a contested date, commemorating an event that has negative connotations for Indigenous Australians, the day has moved away from the emphasis on colonisation to one of social inclusion. Time will tell whether another date will supplant it as the official annual celebration of the Australian nation.

ROSLYN RUSSELL is a historian and museum consultant based in Canberra.

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