3 day weekend!! And a mini history lesson.
I can not express to you just how happy I am that this week is over. And I can't begin to describe just how damn pleased I am that I don't have to go back to work until Tuesday. Yes, ladies and gents, it's a three day weekend.
Australia Day, you know? January 26th is when we (Aussies) celebrate the landing of the First Fleet on Australian shores in 1788. It marks the beginning of British colonisation of Australia. It is also known as Invasion Day...There were kind of people already here when the Europeans landed, but it didn't seem like too big a deal at the time. Hm.
The First Fleet - for those who don't know and/or are mildly interested - as commanded by Captain Arthur Phillip and consisted of eleven (I think, from memory) ships. Six of those ships brought in around 754 convicts; 543 men, 184 women and 22 children (all born during the voyage) - these are the numbers that I have to hand right now, but there are other accounts that give different numbers (I'm personally more comfortable with the rounded figure of 800). My favourite ship is the Lady Penrhyn; it carried only women (most of whom were "fallen" women *winks*) and was lovingly known as "the floating brothel"...Largely because it was. As a side note, I have a friend whose surname is Fishburn, the name of one of the ships which her family took on when they got here.
I enjoy the fact that these people - the people who organised the whole shindig, not the convicts - had no idea what they were getting themselves into. They brought along a few cows, some goats, sheep and a few chickens (or at least whatever animals survived the trip) and found a nice grassy stretch of land (in fact, where the observatory is now), but didn't bring any farmers or build an enclosure. So all of their livestock took off across the land pretty much never to be seen again. They also brought foxes with them (for sport, you know), which was ridiculous, because we've been overrun with the fuckers ever since. They didn't have any real idea of what the soil was like for planting or what the climate was like and so couldn't grow anything because it was A) too sandy and therefore unarable, and B) too fucking hot to grow anything except for the odd potato. I wonder how many people starved to death because the people in charge had no idea what the hell they were doing.
I like that my country is the only one that started out at a prison. It is also the only country where many of the old landmarks were actually made by convicts (parts of the Hyde Park Barracks and St. Andrews church, for example). In fact, from memory, there is a tunnel near St. Andrews that was dug out by convicts - you can see the pick marks where they spent ages digging the damn thing out of the sandstone (of which there was plenty).
I don't like that the whole country was pretty much taken from the Aboriginal people who were here first. And by 'first' I mean, tens of thousands of years earlier. As the Europeans descended and spread Aborigines were killed left, right and centre (for sport, in some instances) and were moved off the land that was rightfully theirs. Not to say that the Indigenous people didn't put up a fight (if you're interested, look up what happened to Ludwig Leichardt and a great many other explorers...). Eventually more horrible things happened to the Aboriginal people, but this was just the beginning.
I can't say that my family has any connection with the First Fleet; neither side of my family is of convict stock (although I wish we were) - my father's side are relatively new Australians, having sailed in from what was then Czechoslovakia, and my mother's side are from all over the UK, but her father's side (this is turning into a bit of a Jerry Springer thing) got here by being paid to leave England and never return (the third son of an Earl was pretty useless and not entitled to anything, so he wasn't wanted to take up space, I guess).
So yeah, there's a million more things I could bang on about here - and given half a chance, I would - but I wanted to give the bare bones of our fairly modest beginnings. Hurrah!
P.S. Australians are known to other people as "shackle-draggers" because of the convict thing. It's usually New Zealanders who bandy this name about. I suspect this is because they can't handle the fact that we call them "sheep-shaggers".