When and where is Australia?

When Is Australia? On 24 September 2018, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison posted an angry tweet after Byron Bay Shire council decided to move their Australia Day ceremony from 26 January. The decision came in response to growing public unease about using the date as a national celebration. Although Britain had claimed the continent and islands now called Australia in 1770, 26 January 1788 marked the beginning of European colonisation with the Gadigal people of Sydney being the first to be physically dispossessed of the land they had occupied for hundreds of generations. Like all First Nations, their sovereignty was never ceded and it is increasingly accepted that terra nullius was 'legal fiction' and was not used by the British to justify dispossession.1 In 2017, three councils in Melbourne and a fourth in Fremantle decided to stop holding official celebrations on 26 January out of respect for First Nations people.2 Then Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull responded by stripping the councils of their right to hold citizenship ceremonies. Likewise, Morrison removed Byron Bay Shire's right to hold citizenship ceremonies (until the Shire backed down and reversed the decision) but he went further than his predecessor by presenting any change to the Australia Day narrative as a form of national self-sabotage.