Should We Ban Australia Day As Well?

[icyfroth]

We are after all celebrating the landing of the First Fleet on January 26th 1988...

Aldi pulls 'racist' T-shirts after online outrage

Discount supermarket chain Aldi has pulled an Australia Day T-shirt and singlet from its stores amid claims on social media that designs featured on the garments were racist.

Complaints that the range of promotional T-shirts with 'AUSTRALIA EST 1788' logos were racist led to people targeting @ALDIAustralia on Twitter and calling for them to be withdrawn.

The T-shirts and singlets were scheduled to go on sale on this week in the lead up to January 26.

Twitter users slammed the design as racist and culturally insensitive to indigenous Australians, who inhabited the continent for thousands of years before Europeans arrived.

Click Here For Article

Perhaps we should abandon the celebration altogether.

[darksideofthemoon]

?????

Isn't that what Australia Day is? 

No meep, Australia Day celebrates the landing of the British on Australian shores and the beginning of white settlement in Australia.

The indigenous people who have been here for thousands of years have not been included in that, and neither do the want to be, it was the beginning of dreadful times for them..

National Australia Day would celebrate the fact that ALL of us in Australia are one big country, not matter the race or creed.

[nero_bolt]

[marigoldcheryl]

But the first fleet did not arrive on 26 January.

[twyngwyn]

2014 thread

[ambercat16]

marigoldcheryl wrote:
But the first fleet did not arrive on 26 January.

---

Didn't it?  What date did it arrive then?

[kopenhagen5]

Apparently between 18th - 20th Jan 1788.

But I wasn't there. 

[ambercat16]

---

@kopenhagen5 wrote:

Apparently between 18th - 20th Jan 1788.

But I wasn't there. 

---

Well, I'm only an ignorant kiwi but I was taught (won't say how long ago that was) that the fleet sailed into Botany Bay between 18 and 20 January but LANDED in Port Jackson on 26 January 1788.

It is the landing on "Australian" soil that is commemorated

[johcaschro]

It is the landing on "Australian" soil that is commemorated.

No, it is the landing and the first settlement on the soil of "New Holland" which is being commemorated.

(or was that Terra Nullius? I was always a bit weak on geography)

[the_great_she_elephant]

I'm all in favour of celebrating Australia Day, but why is the day NSW became a colony deemed a  more important day for a National Public Holiday than the day Australia became a nation?