Australia Day – an excuse to get drunk or recover from a hangover while listening to the Hottest 100. But did you know that back in 1788, for approximately 1400 convicts, marines and British naval crew, Australia Day meant getting drunk or recovering from hangovers while listening to the hottest 100 complain about how bloody warm the weather was?

Run it up the flagpole and see… “The Founding of Australia. By Capt. Arthur Phillip R.N. Sydney Cove, Jan. 26th 1788” by Algernon Talmage. Image courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

On the 26th of January each year (since about 1818, when Governor Macquarie declared the first official celebration of the anniversary), Australia Day/Invasion Day is celebrated/protested (depending on your point of view) all around the country. For Sydney, the event has a particular significance since it’s smack-bang where the unwashed and unlawful of the First Fleet made landfall all those years ago.

Round numbers make people happy, so when 1988 rolled around, Sydney pulled out all the stops in an attempt to mark the bicentennial occasion with a celebration people would never forget.

Well, maybe not all the stops. A proposed re-enactment of the arrival of the First Fleet in the works since 1983 (!) was nixed by the Federal Government on the grounds that it would offend Indigenous Australians. Needless to say it was a contentious issue. On one hand, Indigenous Australians could very easily find such a show highly offensive, while on the other the landing meant a great deal to many Australians of European descent. The event organisers believed that ignoring the landing would be akin to ignoring the suffering that subsequently befell the Indigenous people – a much worse scenario. But the money had to come from somewhere…

Throwing caution and their lengthy track record of racial sensitivity to the four winds, Sydney AM radio station 2GB stepped in to hold a fundraising appeal to ensure a go-ahead. Garish sponsorship of each of the ships made up the difference. The Federal Government elected instead to back a rival event, the ‘Tall Ships’, a comparitively generic show much more celebratory of multiculturalism, as it included ships from around the world.

Approaching the fatal shore. “A Voyage to New South Wales” by William Bradley. Image courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

On Australia Day 1988, corporate sponsored facsimiles of nine of the 11 ships of the First Fleet (led by the ‘Australia Post’ Bounty for some reason) along with the world’s brigade of tall ships sailed into Sydney Harbour en masse, right past a banner erected by the Indigenous community reading ‘WE HAVE SURVIVED’. A brief, tentative compromise had been reached…and then Prince Charles turned up, some planes flew over, and everyone got drunk.

Unleashed by the ABC later that same year, this video collects the highlights of the bicentennial birthday bash for anyone who missed it. It’s actually quite difficult to sit there and imagine the intended audience for this tape – did the ABC assume that everyone would be too blotto to remember the events of the day? Was it meant to be treasured with repeated viewings in years to come? Would the owners fire up the VCR in, say, January 1993 to relive the magic? Then again, I’ve just spent hours ripping and uploading it, and you’ve either just viewed or are about to view it (AREN’T YOU), so forget I said anything.

And all that would be perfectly understandable if the video contained anything remotely interesting, but sadly, it doesn’t. It’s 92 minutes of pomp and ceremony punctuated by a fireworks display that wouldn’t look out of place at a school fete these days (oh wait, can schools still have fireworks?). Oh, but still watch it. Don’t not watch it. Besides, all the shops are shut today. What else are you going to do?

Finally, if anyone at the ABC (or Tommy Tycho) wants to come at me over copyright, consider this: I paid a whopping 20c for just one of many copies of this tape at a Vinnies in Forster, so unless you plan to re-release the thing on ultra hi-def 4K blu-ray and charge $90 a pop, leave it up and let everyone enjoy your 80s production values.

ON WITH THE SHOW…