Oz Day

"On Australia Day we come together as a nation to celebrate what's great about Australia and being Australian. It's the day to reflect on what we have achieved and what we can be proud of in our great nation. It's the day for us to re-commit to making Australia an even better place for the future."

from the Australia Day website

On 26 January 1788, well before our time, Captain Arthur Phillip, commander of the First Fleet of eleven convict ships that had sailed from England, arrived at Sydney Cove.

This is the significance of the date of Australia Day, but the tradition of celebrating Australia Day as a national holiday on 26 January is a fairly recent one. It was 1935 before all Australian states and territories used that name for the day, and it was 1994 before Australia Day was recognised consistently across the nation as a public holiday on that date*.

Personally, I've always felt somewhat conflicted about the choice of this date for a national day of celebration. While yes, it marks the beginnings of our modern nation...it also represents for the Indigenous population the day from which they watched with shock and bewilderment as an invading population forced them off their traditional lands, introduced fatal diseases, and changed their way of life forever.

However, in today's Australia I hope we can look at Australia Day as a day on which to reflect on the society we have become, to imagine the society we want to be and to learn from our past, both good and bad.

Practically, what does Australia Day mean to Australians?

It is a public holiday, and Australians love a day off! As it is celebrated on the day it falls, if it falls on a Tuesday or Thursday it generally means an increase in workplace absenteeism on the Monday or Friday to create a long-long weekend.

It's a day when citizenship ceremonies are held around the country, and 'Australian of the Year' awards are made in local communities.

In recent times, I've noticed an increasing trend to associate Australia Day with barbecues, (encouraged by some clever marketing by meat marketing boards).

For me, I've always seen it as a turning-point day: it marks the end of the summer holidays. Families return from their holidays, schools go back for a new year within days of Australia Day, workplaces swing back into high gear, school books are covered, uniforms are labelled, thongs are kicked off and proper shoes are back on feet.

Australia Day is the last hurrah of the laid back summer for those who take their annual leave then.

What does Australia Day mean to you? Do other countries celebrate similar days?


*see here for a full history of Australia Day

Happy Slow Year!

Time rage comes from an insidious mix of ego (my desires and my needs) and the demands of time (I have to get an answer immediately or I need to get this piece of information ASAP). Just as it is on our roads with car rage and even cyclist rage — get in my way and you will pay!

Instant communication can have its real pluses: knowing where our partners, friends and children are can be very reassuring. But wanting to know where they are all the time may just be fuelling, rather than dampening, our anxieties. Did Marco Polo's mum fret because he didn't text every day?

Rob Moodie* "Time to usher out the fast and the furious"
in The Age, 1-2 Jan 2010

It's the first day of the new year and the new decade. (Is it the tensies? the teenies? the onesies?...there needs to be a UN think tank working on the label we will give this awkward period between the noughties and the twenties.)

The noughties are a decade synonymous with an explosion in personal connectivity. Mobile smart phones, wireless connection, Twitter, Facebook, My Space, messaging, personal GPS...the ways to keep track of ourselves and our colleagues, family and friends are endless.

Perhaps this new decade is a time to re-evaluate our obsession with this connectivity?

Rob Moodie's column in The Age this morning struck a chord with me. Go read the entire piece. I particularly liked the line about Marco Polo's mum.

Before our time, the ways of communicating with people not within our immediate vicinity were, if not limited, infinitely slower than they are today.

Handwritten letters took the slow boat to China. Costly long distance phone calls were booked in advance and connected via an operator. Copies of photos taken at family events were made by leaving the negatives at the local pharmacy and prints were collected days later and mailed to the intended recipients.

Nowadays, an email can be received and replied to on a mobile phone that is in a beach bag, while you sit on the sand. Phone calls can be made across the world and timezones at low cost via Skype or VOIP. Photos can be uploaded and emailed around the world practically while the event is still continuing. Family across the country can have a pic of junior blowing out the candles saved as a desktop background before the smoke has actually cleared.

But does all this connectivity make life simpler?

The times I log into Facebook, my head spins with the activities of all my 'friends'. I feel guilty if I haven't replied to message or a missed call on my mobile phone within a short time. My inbox overflows with emails I have flagged to respond to, or that contain something I have to add to my 'to-do' list.

As Rob Moodie says, "We are tyrannised by the to-do list, and also by the to-worry-about list and the to-feel-guilty-about list. As our inboxes overload and our lists expand, we get more irritable and more anxious".

And the most insidious aspect of all this connectivity is that it has blurred the distinction between leisure and work time. Never again will corporate workers be able to 'leave work' at the end of the day.

All of which means that home and family life is never 100 per cent the focus of most corporate workers. One ear or one eye is always on the Blackberry or the iPhone or the computer screen, even if only to skim over the cause of the latest ping and decide that it is not in fact urgent and can wait for a response until the following day, or after the holidays.

In order to slow our lives down and mentally de-clutter, we need to chose to physically turn off these devices; to adjust our expectations of others' response times; and to enjoy our experience of the present without being tuned in to a reality that exists elsewhere, whether it be the workplace or another geographic location.

But is that even possible? Or desirable? Tell us what you think.

Oh, and we wish you a happy, but slow, New Year!

*Professor Rob Moodie is chairman of global health at the University of Melbourne's Nossal Institute.