Australia Doing Their Forefathers Proud

By Susan Tifft

The nation's beginnings were unpromising, to say the least. On Jan. 26, 1788, after an eight-month journey that began in Portsmouth, England, Captain Arthur Phillip's fleet of eleven ships straggled into what would later be called Sydney Harbor with more than 700 convicted criminals. The men went ashore at once, but it was not until about two weeks later that the female convicts were permitted to leave the vessels. That night, in celebration of the women's arrival, sailors and guards made merry with rum. As the sky swelled with lightning and a driving rain, inhibitions melted. The resulting "debauchery and wild riot," according to one British officer who recorded the scene in his diary, went on for days.

Last week more than 2 million new immigrants and descendants of those first settlers converged on banner-bedecked Sydney Harbor to celebrate the 200th birthday of the penal colony that became Australia. Their revelry would have made their forefathers feel proud -- and maybe even at home. The celebrants, many toting picnic baskets and "eskys" (coolers filled with beer and ice), crammed beaches, bridges, cliffs, ocean liners and all manner of other vessels, craning their necks for a glimpse of the eleven tall ships that re- enacted the exiles' arrival. The high-masted re-creations were at the center of a "great parade of sail" that brought 200 tall ships to Sydney Harbor from 40-odd countries. Overhead, the sky was abuzz with blimps, helicopters and sky writers. Thousands of people crowded near the water's edge, blowing plastic horns, drinking beer, waving Australian flags and singing Waltzing Matilda.

For those in a mood to partake of the down-home pleasures of Down Under, there were melon-seed-spitting contests and coal-shoveling competitions. For the more refined, there were concerts by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the premiere of a musical based on Manning Clark's six-volume History of Australia. When the sun went down, 200 guns boomed a birthday salute, and a spray of fireworks, including 200 Roman candles, twinkled and sparkled over the weary but still jubilant throng.

The mood of exuberant abandon was contagious: Britain's normally reserved Prince Charles, visiting the country for the celebration, donned an Australian army "digger" hat and later stepped out for a dance with Princess Di at a Melbourne disco. "What a Party!" exclaimed The Sun, one of Sydney's two evening papers. "Never has there been a day on which it felt so good to be Australian."

Not everyone felt the glow, however. Even as the revelers whooped it up in the harbor, more than 20,000 members of Australia's aboriginal minority congregated a mile away in a downtown park to begin what they called a "year of mourning." A large number had traveled the breadth of the 3,000-mile-wide continent in buses and pickup trucks to protest the commemoration of what they maintained was a white invasion of their homeland and two centuries of dispossession.

Ever since their cries of "Warra, warra!" (Go away!) were ignored by Phillip's men, Australia's native people, who now constitute only 1.4% of the 16.5 million population, have been mired in poverty and neglect. Today a majority are relegated to the squalid fringes of cities and rural towns, eking out a living as stockmen and laborers. But even amid the bicentennial euphoria, there were signs that life may improve for the nation's original inhabitants. In a speech on the front court of Sydney's opera house, Prime Minister Bob Hawke admonished about 300 invited guests to "remember what we owe to the people who have been before us." Said Prince Charles, in a speech that followed Hawke's: "A country free enough to examine its own conscience is a land worth living in, a land to be envied."

With reporting by John Dunn/Melbourne