Post by Wayne Hall on Nov 18, 2023 6:36:49 GMT -5
The regeneration of Australian identity through culture is a great idea and I would like to offer a contribution. My contribution has two components: the first has to do with Australia Day, currently 26th January but this date is under attack from the enemies of Australian identity, including many people with the best of intentions which, as we have heard, the road to hell is paved with. Here is an example of what they said, and say:
The best approach to these good intentions is, perhaps, to co-opt them, and in the wake of the outcome of the Voice referendum this becomes very feasible: let Australia Day be shifted to 14th October, anniversary of the 2023 referendum.
So what is to be done with 26th January? Other proposals have been made on this subject in the past. A better idea becomes available following the result of the Voice referendum: it just so happens that 26th January is the date when in 1828 modern Greece's first leader, the subsequently assassinated Ioannis Capodistrias, was sworn in at the cathedral of Aegina, establishing the modern Greek state. Here is a video on this, produced by the Aegina Association of Active Citizens and screened a decade ago at the municipality's annual celebration on 26th January, and later at the Rhodes ecological film festival.
What about the idea of rebranding 26th January as Loyalty Day, centred on Greek Australians and Australian Greeks but applying to all Australians and all Greeks. The fact that the Australian state evolved from a British prison does not legitimate disloyalty to it by Australians. Likewise, the fact that the Greek state was founded by a major European statesman (among much else architect of the constitution of Switzerland) whose independence was so greatly opposed by Europe's rulers that he was assassinated and a Bavarian king brought in to set the seal on the "official" founding of the modern Greek state in 1830, does not legitimate the sarcasm, (low-key disloyalty, which is nevertheless able, addressing non-Greeks, to flip into comical chauvinism) displayed by some Greeks over the character of their own country. European integration, and today's European Union, should have started from Greece, but history decided otherwise. No person, and few countries, can decide to be born the way they themselves wish.
The idea of European integration does not retain the prestige it enjoyed before history took the turn it took in 2020 (indeed well before that!). The post World War II Europe of NATO, successor to Britain's maritime empire, now faces an alternative central-Asian-based project. Greece and Australia are both aligned with the status quo ante and so in this connection confront the same challenge.