September 1, 2024
Parliament House
Canberra
Speech to
inaugural joint sitting of both Houses of the Australian Parliamentary Congress
President
of the Commonwealth of Australia
‘Our
Wattle Republic’
September
1 has many names. Some welcome it as spring’s dawn, a time to celebrate
nature’s renewal. For others it is Wattle Day — a time when the smells of
Spring are in the air and the vivid gold of the blossom is literally arresting.
Wattle Day is celebrated annually on the first day of spring, and captures
something crucial to the success of our new republic — a feeling for
country – for today is the
first day of our new republic, the Commonwealth of Australia.
A sprig of Australia's national
floral emblem, the golden wattle,
Acacia pycnantha is traditionally
worn on the first day of spring. The green and gold of its leaves and blossoms
were declared national colours in 1984 and in 1988 the wattle was adopted as
the official national flower. In Australia, the wattles are the largest genus
of flowering plants. In Australia you could plant two or three different
wattles for every day of the year, and still have plenty left over, for
Australia has more acacia species than the year has days. These acacias are
extremely diverse and found in habitats from rainforest to arid lands.
Wattle has been the great witness
to the entire Australian story. It has welcomed us all — Indigenous, colonial
and modern day immigrants. Australians may have made a home for themselves
amongst the gumtrees, but it is the wattle tree that has found its way into Australian
symbolism. Most Australians can recognise a wattle, at least when it is in
flower.
Like the Southern Cross, the appeal of the wattle
is not first and foremost to the idea of the nation — but to the idea of
place.
Wattle Day is about land and people. Wattle is the blaze of colour that paints
Australia's landscape every year. It is the gold that blends with the eucalypt
green to form the green and gold around which Australians so willingly unite.
Because wattle springs organically from the land it bonds Australians as a
people to the land. The democracy of wattles – the fact that they grow in all
states – was the overpowering reason why the wattle and not the waratah was
chosen as the floral emblem in the early twentieth century. Like our people,
wattle has great diversity (with nearly 1,000 species) and resilience. It is a
unifying symbol for all Australians. There is no other symbol that says so much
about us and our land.
Because of its association with
the land and the care that indigenous, settler and modern day Australians have
for it, Wattle Day can be seen as an occasion to celebrate and honour the
shared earth. Respecting and caring for land, protecting its native flora and fauna,
and using wisely its water resources are major challenges to commit to as a
people. Australia's future is bound tightly with the health of Australia's
environment and land. As a living expression of land, wattle links us to the
earliest occupation of the Australian continent. Indigenous Australians used
wattle for thousands of years as a season marker (a sign that the whales were
coming), as a source of food, and the raw material of hunting and sound
instruments. This is part of wattle's wonderful heritage as a unifying symbol
of land, people and the nation - a symbol that has no unpleasant baggage.
Wattle celebrations first arose as
occasions when earlier generations of Australians stood up and said:
“I am from this land. This place is home."
The first known use of wattle as a meaningful
emblem in the Australian colonies was in Hobart Town in 1838 when a resident
suggested wearing a sprig of wattle to celebrate the golden jubilee of the
landing at Sydney Cove. There was in this seemingly small gesture a suggestion
of an independent Australia. At a regatta in 1842 to mark the anniversary of
Tasman's discovery of Van Diemen's Land, many of the celebrant's again wore a
sprig of wattle. The Golden Wattle was the first symbol of the Adelaide
Australian Natives' Association's 'Wattle Blossom League'. On Foundation Day,
26 January 1891, the Adelaide Australian Natives’ Association represented
itself with a Wattle Blossom Banner embroidered with Golden Wattle by its
ladies' branch.
But it was not until the beginning
of the twentieth century that an official Wattle Day was proclaimed after a
suggestion made by the naturalist Archibald Campbell in Sydney. Campbell's
suggestion led to a meeting to form a Wattle Day League which coordinated the
states into celebrating the first Wattle Day on 1 September 1910. The Wattle
Day League was a patriotic society in the vein of the Australian Natives'
Association. The day was a celebration of the unique land, people and
institutions of Australia, and was marked in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney
with activities including the planting of wattle trees in the school grounds,
decorating public sites with wattle and wearing wattle.
At the time the
Sydney
Morning Herald wrote:
"To the native born Australian the wattle
stands for home, country, kindred, sunshine and love - every instinct that the
heart deeply enshrines".
The celebration of the day continued until the beginning
of the First World War.
Wattle first appeared on
Australia’s Coat of Arms when the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette of 18
January 1913 promulgated a new Coat of Arms for Australia. During 1911
and 1912, Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher had taken a keen interest in the
complex question of national identity and set about to ‘Australianise’ our
government system and national symbols. Home-grown symbols, he knew in his
heart, were essential for a nation so young. Among the significant changes made
in the 1913 Coat of Arms was the inclusion of a spray of wattle as a background
feature and a Federation Star, and instead of a shield displaying the English
cross of St George, there was one showing the emblems of the six states. It is all the more appropriate that
Wattle is the background of our national Coat of Arms, as it has been here for
millennia. Wattle has welcomed us all — Indigenous, colonial and modern day
immigrants. Wattle has been the great witness to the entire Australian
story.
For many Australians when you
mention wattle they don’t immediately think of the spray around the Coat of
Arms, or the design embedded in the order of Australia. Rather the first
thought is the last line of Henry Lawson’s stanza from Freedom on the
Wallaby.
So we must fly
a rebel flag,
As others did
before us,
And we must
sing a rebel song
And join in
rebel chorus.
We’ll make the
tyrant feel the sting
O’ those that
they would throttle;
They needn’t
say the fault is ours
If blood
should stain the wattle!
In 1891 the battle lines were drawn and action
spread across central Queensland shearing sheds and towns, from February 1891
until well into May and June. Henry Lawson’s poem was his comment on the 1891
shearers’ strike and represented the rebellious spirit of those times. Lawson
was writing about freedom and independence in Australia, and although he may
have alluded to "blood on the wattle" he was never a serious
advocate of armed revolution. His was more a call to address a sense of
injustice. In September 1981, historian Manning Clark wrote in the Sydney Morning
Herald:
'I love the spring. It means the wattle comes
out again. It is a symbol of everything one loves about Australia and the ideal
of the uniqueness of Australia. To me, every spring holds out the hope
that it won’t be long before Australia is completely independent [but I
also] share Henry Lawson’s view that blood should never stain the wattle.'
In other words, independence of course, but
peacefully achieved.
In 2015, during his first National
Press Club Speech, the then newly minted national chair of the Australian
Republican Movement, Peter FitzSimons, made a clarion call for movement towards
a republic in the next five years:
A generation ago Australia had a go at becoming
a republic and for a variety of well-documented reasons – most particularly
including disunity, even among republicans, and a prime minister who just
didn't believe in it – didn't quite get there.
But that was then, and this is now, and it is
our hope and belief that sometime in the next five years Australia can again
begin the formal process towards becoming the Republic of Australia – an
independent sovereign nation, beneath the Southern Cross we stand, a sprig of
wattle in our hand.
Of course, FitzSimons was quoting from the
Australian cricket team victory song
Under
The Southern Cross I Stand with its reference to “a sprig of wattle in our
hand”. Wattle is a broad and inclusive symbol. It touches all levels of
society, from very early pioneers and World War I diggers (buried with a
customary sprig of wattle), to victims of the Bali bombings and the nation’s
best who are honoured with Order of Australia awards with insignia designed
around the shape of a single wattle blossom. Australian Olympic athletes wear
wattle inspired green and gold uniforms. A Governor General, Sir William Deane,
took wattle blossoms to Switzerland to commemorate young Australians who died
there and Prime Minister John Howard wore sprigs of wattle at ceremonies after
the Bali bombings
. Wattle has
journeyed with us in kitbags, pockets and letters to places that become
synonymous with our shared story, be they Gallipoli, Kokoda or Swiss canyons. Wattle
is a metaphor for innocence and hope, the constant promise of rebirth, that
simple and powerful beauty of the wattle flower — indigenous, Australian, unsullied
by the memory of war and destruction.
So, when the blaze of wattle
lights up the Australian landscape each year, let us all remember that the
wattle is a symbol of our land that unites us all. So, on this Wattle Day let
us all take a moment and reflect on the wattle flower which symbolises an
egalitarian, classless, free citizenry. Our new
Commonwealth of Australia is
a fully and truly independent Australia, a republican nation that determines its
own future, a nation that protects its citizens, its environment and its
future. A country that is fair and free.
Three cheers for our new Australian republic.
Congratulations
to the British royal pair. The growing British royal family seems to be taking
a page out of the Princess Mary book and her Danish royal brood of four.
