Today, 26 January, is Australia Day, by official government decree. It remembers the landfall on the eastern shores of this continent made by the British-appointed Governor Arthur Philip, his troops, and the convicts of what we now call The First Fleet. Prior to his departure from Britain, Phillip had received Instructions (composed by Lord Sydney) from King George III, “with the advice of his Privy Council”. These Instructions included Phillip’s Commission as Captain-General and Governor-in-Chief of New South Wales.
Despite extensive searching, these Instructions cannot be located in any library or state records office in Australia, nor in Britain. (Philip obviously had an inefficient PA !!) There is an amended Commission, located with the Public Record Office in London, dated 25 April 1787. This document designated the territory of New South Wales as including “all the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean” as well as the mainland mass running westward to the 135th meridian, that is, about mid-way through the continent. Such was the way of British imperialism.
We don’t know exactly what Philip said on 26 January 1788. He subsequently wrote a letter on 3 July that year to William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne and 2nd Earl of Shelburne, in which he explained that “Port Jackson … I have preferd to Botany bay as affording a more eligible Situation for the Colony, & being with out exception the finest Harbour in the World” and notes that “this Country will hereafter be a most Valuable acquisition to Great Brittain from its situation.”
That’s what we remember on Australia Day. This day has, of course, been celebrated on other days in the past. In 1915, it was held on 30 July. The Australian War Memorial notes that it was suggested to the Premier of NSW that “an ‘Australia Day’ [be held] as a way of drawing on the pride of Australians in their soldiers’ recent achievements at Gallipoli”. The next year, the Australia Day committee that had formed in 1915 to organise the war effort fundraising determined that it would be held on 28 July.
In NSW, since the time of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, 26 January had been commemorated as “Anniversary Day” or “Founders Day”. There are records from as early as 1808 of ex-convicts participating in “drinking and merriment” on the evening of 25 January to celebrate their new home. In Tasmania, by contrast, “Hobart Regatta Day” was established on 1 December 1838, to commemorate the anniversary of Abel Tasman’s discovery of the island he named Van Diemen’s Land, in 1642. In 1879 it was moved to be earlier in the year, in January or February.
The name “Australia” was further entrenched in the (un)imaginatively-named Western Australia. Overwest, “Foundation Day” has long been held on the first Monday in June, to commemorate the founding of the Swan River Colony in 1829. In the equally (un)imaginatively-named South Australia, “Proclamation Day” celebrated the date the government was established in South Australia as a British province, on 28 December 1836. It was when South Australia held its “founding day” celebrations for decades, until they unified with other states to celebrate “Australia Day” on 26 January. But there are still celebrations for “Proclamation Day” each year on 28 December.
By 1935, celebrations were held in all states on 26 January, although it was still known as “Anniversary Day” in NSW, and “Foundation Day” in other areas. The Sesquicentenary (150th anniversary) of British colonisation of Australia was widely celebrated in all state capitals in 1938. A significant protest took place on this day in 1938, when the Australian Natives Association held a “Day of Mourning”. The main celebrations were held in Sydney, but newspapers from others states show that the language of “Anniversary Day” had been adopted there for 26 January, recognising it to be a national date of significance. Its place in national life was, despite Indigenous protests, now settled.
In 1946, the Federal Government and all state governments agreed to unify all the state-based Australia Day celebrations and celebrate on 26 January as a country. The “Australia Day” public holiday was taken on the Monday closest to the 26th, giving the traditional “long weekend” in late January, which for many signalled the end of summer, the return to school and work.
Questioning of the celebratory status of Australia Day gained impetus during the 1988 Bicentenary, when many protests were staged across Australia, involving both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. They wanted Australia Day to become a commemoration rather than a celebration of Australia’s history.
However, in 1994 the conservative Federal Government decided that the public holiday would be on the actual day of 26 January itself. And so it has been, for 31 years. (So that’s tomorrow: enjoy!)
For many centuries Europeans believed there must be a vast land in the southern hemisphere, which they called Terra Australis Incognita, a Latin phrase for “the Unknown South Land”. (In Latin, austral means “south”.) A few decades after the 1788 British invasion and colonisation of the lands around Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour), Matthew Flinders circumnavigated the continent in 1803. Flinders used the name “Australia” to describe the continent on a hand drawn map in 1804. That map was published in 1814 and the continent was named “Terra Australis”.
Dutch explorers had been referring to the continent as “New Holland” since the 17th century. On colonising the region, the British had initially named the Colony “New South Wales”, and that name, of course, has continued to be used to apply to various eastern parts of the continent. In 1817, however, Governor Lachlan Macquarie endorsed the name “Australia” to replace “New Holland” in a dispatch to the Colonial Office in London; over time, this name came into common local usage.
By 1824 the British Admiralty started to officially use the name, and the term “Australia” was first used in British legislation which decreed that British law was to apply to the two colonies of “New South Wales” (named in reminiscence of a region in Britain that the landscape allegedly reflected) and Van Diemen’s Land (named after its Dutch “discoverer”). Other state names that came later managed to reference the main name of “Australia” (South, or Western), as well as Victoria (in the state of the same name), the long-reigning British monarch (reflected in Queensand).
More to come tomorrow (on the public holiday), reflecting further on what it is that we “celebrate” on this day …
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I have consulted the following websites for this blog:
https://www.library.gov.au/research/research-guides-0/where-name-australia-came
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-24/australia-day-public-holiday-janaury-26-sunday/104837212
https://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-35.html
https://firstfleetfellowship.org.au/events/letter-from-governor-arthur-phillip/
Because of the connection with the arrival of British imperial colonizers and their subsequent expanding “settlement”, do we need to change the date? For a fun discussion of “change the date”, see
An Informed Faith 