The celebration of ‘Australia Day’ is first and primarily a tool of colonisation. On January 26th, 1788, the British fleet raised its flag intending to take sovereign Aboriginal land for the crown, resulting in the still ongoing genocide of the continent’s First Peoples. This date has been celebrated yearly, since it was coined ‘Australia Day’ in 1935 and made an official public holiday in 1994. Like many nationalist rituals, these celebrations paper over the genocide and trans-generational memory of violence toward this continent’s sovereign people, replacing it with the myth of Terra Nullius and ‘Australia’s’ legitimacy. Given this, there is no date appropriate to celebrate ongoing genocide.

January 26th is celebrated by many migrant families as a day of new beginnings, but the only appropriate response to a national holiday erasing genocide is to treat it as a day of mourning for First Nations people. Protests of this day, led by First Nations, started on January 26th 1888. On January 26th 1938, members of the Aboriginal Progressive Association held the Day of Mourning and Protest. The protest took place in Sydney after an event to celebrate British Royal Navy officer Arthur Phillip’s landing, where 1000 First Nations people and their supporters formed a silent march through the streets of Sydney.

It is a day where settlers are asked to avoid displays of national pride and to engage in learning, talking with relatives and friends, and join rallies around the continent to stand with First Nations people. But what can be done beyond this day? What is a long-term anti-colonial strategy worth engaging with?

If we are organising against colonial capitalism, we can’t look past the workers that carry out much of its operations, in the mines, expanding its cities, building its prisons, being employed in its impotent social services, producing its destructive agriculture, demolishing and building over cultural sites, teaching nationalist and capitalist curriculums in education. Historically, Indigenous communities have called upon militant unions to protect sites of community and culture. Unions did this through banning demolitions and developments that weren’t in the interests of affected communities. They helped make houses livable in Redfern, against developers and councils attempts to evict First Nations people and gentrify the area. In attempts to give communities control over their fate, bans were in place until the affected communities were consulted and involved in alternative planning developments.

In this way, workers can be involved in halting colonial projects, and to push for the construction of better housing, schooling and institutions that are at the directive of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The last few decades has been an experiment in substituting class power for other forms of community and activist power, but the left is at a markedly low point. Wins of the past are now being walked back – without substantial counter-power, the government will keep doing this.

ARC UP is an Anarchist Communist organisation made up of Indigenous, migrant and settler workers that are united around the goal of building the class power necessary to advance struggles like First Nations liberation, in ways comparable to the heyday of militant unionism in this country. Workers, both Indigenous and settler can act as the muscle to enforce the expressed will of First Nations communities. Our organisation is a place to strategise, support and coordinate these organising efforts.

Invasion Day is ultimately a day like any other in this colony. To truly honour the legacy of First Peoples’ resistance on this continent, we have to get serious about building a fighting workers movement – one that can genuinely break the current ceiling of possibility, one that refuses to be tied to the state and bureaucrats, one that doesn’t ask for colonial recognition, one that doesn’t seek to supplant First Nations sovereignty but facilitate its realisation, and one that understands that Land Back is to the benefit of us all.