Grow Up Australia Wake Up! (ODT)

January 26 – ‘Australia Day’ – is a political project forced upon the nation by born-to-rulers. They want consensus for the wealth amassed through theft of Aboriginal peoples’ land and resources, and through the convict transportation system of slave labour. We will hear stories of triumphant ‘discovery’, and ‘progress’, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

So decrepit was the first New South Wales colony that the military controlled all economic activity (the Rum Corps) – a beacon of reaction against even liberal capitalists across the world.

Why on earth did the flatpack colony set up here? Eight years prior to the Fleet’s arrival Captain Cook (the bloke we have memorials for across the country) was given urgent orders by London to find suitable land to establish a penal colony. After hundreds of years of wreaking absolute havoc on the peoples of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, British prisons were bursting at the seams.

Crime was a construction of the empire – a new and experimental time for creating systems of control. Political dissidents, peasants and workers attempting to defend themselves since the Enclosures and now facing violent industrialisation, were locked up in their thousands for crimes of theft, treason, riot, incitement, seditious libel and more.

via We’ll Never Advance Australia Fair Until We Face Our Black Past – New Matilda