Australia Day is celebrated as a festive, colorful and multicultural days in the country's major cities, but in newspapers and television a darker side is also reflected. An undercurrent of protest and anger from Australians who think it is a scandal that the nation chooses to celebrate and commemorate the 26th of January - the day the first Britons went ashore and started something which historians are talking about quickly developed into a real genocide of the indigenous population. A little over a hundred years later, only 13 percent of the indigenous population was still around.
"I'm angry, I see red, my blood boils," one who wrote. And there are many who believe that Australia Day should be called 'Invasion Day'. SBS's television channel NITV has decided to consistently call the day 'Survival Day'.
The Danish historian Robert Ørsted-Jensen, who lives in Brisbane, posted an article link on Facebook - and together with the link a picture showed up with an awful lot of bones - the remains from a mass murder - under a headline that read: "Why Australia Day has to finish, not be moved to another day or month or renamed, but finished."
The article was not Roberts - he is currently busy writing on a series of books about a Danish journalist and editor, Carl Feilberg, who was standing up for the Aboriginal communities in the 1800's - 125 years ago. Carl Feilberg was born in 1844 in Borgergade in Copenhagen, and he had the talent to write, so he ended up making himself a formidable career in Australia, where he became editor-in-chief of The Brisbane Courier - which at the time was the country's third largest newspaper. Australians saw him as one of the most influential political commentators at the time.
We called Robert Oersted-Jensen on the phone to hear what he thought about Australia Day - and instead we were given an exciting and hour-long tale of Carl Feilbergs struggle for human rights, the Aboriginal people - and why it is important that we also know that part of Australia's history.
Carl Feilberg wrote on the subject from two different angles, explains Robert. He described the social political reality in the cities - and the war that took place between black and white Australians in the rural areas. In 1880 he published a paper entitled 'The Way We Civilise; Black and White; The Native Police' - a pamphlet, which has been called "one of the most influential political struggle writings in Australian history ..."
This is an eight-minute excerpt of the interview. We hope to be able to bring more of it at a later stage.
The interview is in Danish language.
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