>My calendar also indicates today as Australia Day. Wonder if it celebrates the arrival of Capt. Cook? (linking pun on recipes fully intended). Guess we'll have to wait for the Wizards of Oz to finish celebrating and clue us in.G'day. I've just come up for air after ploughing - he says mixametaphorototically - through the 1100-odd (and I mean odd) posts which appeared during my one-week absence.
The First Fleet carrying the initial shipment of convicts from England arrived in Botany Bay, New South Wales on 26 January 1788 (18 years or so after Capt Cook). Funny sort of thing to celebrate as your national day, you might say, and there are thousands of Australians who would agree with you, not the least many Aboriginal people who regard it as a celebration of the white invasion of their country. Trouble is, without a tea party, war of independence or like event of national (and unifying) significance, it's the best we've come up with.
Although the official date is 26 January, the public holiday used to be declared on the nearest Monday, in order to provide that great Aussie tradition the "long weekend". In recent years the public holiday has been gazetted to fall on the 26 January itself, in an attempt to focus us on celebrating our national spirit etc etc rather than the time off work. This year it was, of course, a Friday, so we got the long weekend anyway
, although for many people it passed with little fanfare during the last week of the summer school holidays. To complicate matters, on 1 January this year we celebrated the centenary of Federation - yes, it was only 100 years ago that the various states, several of which originated as disparate penal colonies, came together as a federated country with its own constitution and government (and someone else's monarch, but that's another story). With Australia Day coming so soon on the heels of those celebrations, I think we were all paraded out.
