(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Seems Australia’s culture warriors might have missed their chance. As the media reporting has it, Australians have already moved Australia Day on from its 30-year-long moment of celebration of European settlement into a deeper recognition of the country. 

The moment the date marks — the hoisting of the British flag on Gadigal land to assert the beginnings of colonisation in 1788 — went all but unremarked in the pre-date debate about what the day meant, or could mean. More, much of that discussion came from Aboriginal voices who’ve led the resistance to the co-option of the date in the service of an exclusionary settler nationalism.

Perhaps it’s laid a template for the media, too, to move on from a narrow “change the date” controversy into deeper reflection. Take Wesley Enoch’s commentary in the Nine mastheads for the day “to stand as a spur to discuss our history and remember the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia.” Or Megan Davis quoted in The Australian: “We don’t need to change the date, but the Uluru Statement can change the nation.” As IndigenousX’s Luke Pearson has been saying over the past few Australia Days: don’t change the date, change the nation.

Maybe, just maybe, we can hope that the nuance of the past few days has washed the panic over “wokeness” that continues to roil US politics out from Australian discussion. Perhaps the door to embracing the opportunity of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is more open than it’s looked.

There’s been some eye-rubbing moments. Was it really just a year ago that Prime Minister Scott Morrison was lashing out at Cricket Australia for its reluctance to wrap its Big Bash matches in the ritual of the date and dismissing Invasion Day protests with ham-fisted what-aboutery?

“When those 12 [sic] ships turned up in Sydney all those years ago, it wasn’t a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either,” he lectured in his own rendering of the Howard era’s “black armband” bombast.

This year, his official statement was all thoughtful consideration about the Australian story: “A story,” he wrote in the Nine mastheads, “of strength and resilience that spans 65,000 years, of a continent that we love and contend with, and of a free and fair people who live in relative harmony.”

Where previous years brought federal government bans on council’s shifting citizenship ceremonies from January 26, this year brought a more inclusionary political symbolism: the buy-out of copyright in the Aboriginal flag and the proposal of the Ngurra Cultural Precinct within Canberra’s parliamentary triangle as “a place of reflection and recognition for Indigenous Australians, the oldest living culture in the world”.

Even the News Corp media had more important things to do than defending the continued celebration of the colonial project, like civility policing outgoing Australian of the Year Grace Tame’s “not willing to make nice” moment. (“What a graceless sourpuss,” sniffed Miranda Devine in the company’s tabloids. Meanwhile on social media, Amy Remeikis’ takedown of The Australian‘s Peter van Onselen on The Project went viral.)

The only real clanger came in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph editorial where, apparently, “the arrival in Australia of the First Fleet in 1788 was the initial step towards multiculturalism.” 

By the morning after, as the date receded into the media’s rear-view mirror, all the protests and reflections — both official and Indigenous — were more or less neutrally integrated into the “what just happened” reporting of the day. Even the red-paint rendering of Melbourne’s Cook statue was hurried over as “vandalism” rather than seized as an opportunity for hand-wringing moral panic.

In the lead-up to the day, polling gave some insight into what’s going on. The Conversation reported that while 60% may want to keep the date, that support slides quickly as those asked get younger. 

It may be that Morrison is attempting to pivot back to his Team Australia moment of the early pandemic. Maybe he thinks this next election will be determined more by suburban women voters tempted by the “Voices of” independents than by the “men at risk of voting Labor” identified by Guardian Australia’s Katherine Murphy last year. 

The use of Australia Day to imagine the Australian community out of settler nationalism is recent. Much of the country has always felt uncomfortable with its politicisation. It already felt like an anachronism when launched as part of the 1988 bicentennial celebrations. 

Now, maybe, the consistent resistance to that narrow nationalism is finally winning out.