Australia Day wasn’t always on 26 January. Why is the national holiday on that date now?

Key Points

This year’s Australia Day marks the 236th anniversary of the British flag first being hoisted at Sydney Cove. It’s a national holiday that has been controversial for at least the past 89 years. It was in 1935 that 26 January was first celebrated across the country as Australia Day, and the name and date have stuck ever since, despite First Nations people declaring it as a day of mourning shortly after it was initiated.Since then, the controversy surrounding Australia Day and its date has escalated.Many Australians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, now refer to it as Invasion Day or Survival Day. About 80 local councils across Australia of their annual citizenship ceremonies. Last year, in recognition that “26 January represents a day of mourning and reflection for some Victorians and is a challenging time for First Peoples,” and that the state government is “committed to addressing past and ongoing injustices.”Many of these changes, as with ongoing calls to change the date of the nationwide public holiday, have been met with disdain and denunciations from those who adamantly defend 26 January as a day to celebrate Australia and take pride in being able to call it home.

With tensions around the date seeming to rise each year, it’s important to take stock of what Australia Day has historically represented, why it ended up being on 26 January in the first place, and how that wasn’t always the case.

What actually is Australia Day?

The term Australia Day has been used to refer to a handful of annual celebrations in the nation’s relatively short post-colonial history. Its first iteration, which began in 1915, was as a fundraising effort for the First World War. At that time, two decades before moving to the current date, it was celebrated on 30 July.

A woman named Ellen Wharton-Kirke, whose four sons enlisted to fight in the war, suggested the holiday to NSW Premier Sir Charles Wade.

According to the Australian War Memorial website, Wharton-Kirke “had seen the generosity of the Australian people during other fundraising days and saw an ‘Australia Day’ as a way of drawing on the pride of Australians in their soldiers’ recent achievements at Gallipoli.”In 1916, the committee that had formed to organise the war fundraising effort determined that Australia Day would instead be held on 28 July.

It wasn’t until 19 years later, in 1935, that all of Australia’s states agreed to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January.

Why is Australia Day celebrated on 26 January?

While some believe this date commemorates the landing of the First Fleet, when convicts from England first set foot in Australia in 1788, it actually marks the day the fleet went ashore in Sydney Cove, a small bay in Sydney Harbour, about a week later.It was on this day that Captain Arthur Phillip, who also officially declared British sovereignty over half of Australia, first raised the Union Jack flag in Sydney Cove.

It is for this reason that the date carries so much significance and sombreness for First Nations Australians: it symbolises the start of a violent and dispossessive colonial campaign, the shockwaves of which are still being felt throughout successive generations of the country’s Indigenous peoples today.

Aboriginal activists declared 26 January a day of mourning as early as 1938, just three years after it was first dubbed Australia Day.”The 26th of January will always be a day of mourning and a day of lament for my people,” Aboriginal pastor Ray Minniecon told SBS News before Australia Day in 2018.”It was a deliberate invasion of our people. It also meant the massacres and genocides of our peoples right across this country.”

Nonetheless, the date and name stuck, and in 1994 it became a public holiday in every state and territory.

Was 26 January always a celebration of being Australian?

The date of 26 January was initially designated as a public holiday for NSW in 1838, marking the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the British in Sydney and the colony’s foundation. Back then it was more commonly referred to as Foundation Day, but was later renamed Anniversary Day. By the 100th anniversary of the British arrival in 1888, all colonies except South Australia observed it.

However, at that time it hadn’t yet become a nationalist event.

“Throughout the 19th century, January 26 was a celebration of Britishness held by people who largely identified as Australian Britons,” Benjamin T Jones, senior lecturer in history at Melbourne’s CQ University, wrote in The Conversation on Australia Day in 2023.And even after the Australian colonies federated in 1901, the primary national holiday remained Empire Day, celebrated on 24 May.

And that holiday’s “choice of date (the late Queen Victoria’s birthday) and the form of celebrations were more imperial than nationalist in flavour,” Jones wrote.

When else could Australia Day be?

Jones also highlighted how unusual it is for Australia’s national holiday to fall on the date that it does.”Most countries hold their national holiday on the date they became independent,” he said.

“It’s a quirk of Australian history that the date the British flag was raised has taken this role, but it demonstrates how malleable national symbols can be.”

While there is no clear favourite for an alternative date on which to mark Australia Day, other possible dates include the formation of the Federation on 1 January 1901; 9 July, when Queen Victoria gave consent to the Constitution of Australia or the Eureka Stockade on 3 December.

There is also the anniversary of the Apology to the Stolen Generations (13 February), Sorry Day (26 May), the anniversary of the 1967 referendum (27 May) or the Mabo Judgement (3 June), NAIDOC Week (beginning the first Sunday in July), and the anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (13 September).