Sydney City Council snubs its own colonial history on Australia Day, gives $2 million to Chinese New Year instead

British heritage demonised as Aboriginal cause used to bludgeon Australia

January 26 is not just Australia Day, it was the first settlement of Sydney.

The First Fleet set up camp in Sydney Cove on 26 January, 1788. Eleven ships of British colonists and convicts hacked the beginnings of a modern city out of sandstone and bush.

You would think City of Sydney Council might do some small thing to commemorate this, but there’s not an Australian flag or a Captain Arthur Phillip in sight.

The Council has given $2 million to celebrate Chinese New Year over 19 days of festivities instead.

The Founding of Australia by Captain Arthur Phillip RN, Sydney Cove, Jan 26, 1788, by Algernon Talmage, 1937. State Library NSW

The Council calls it “Sydney Lunar Festival” as if it were home-grown instead of a Chinese cultural tradition more than 3500 years old, possibly emanating from the Shang Dynasty.

“For Sydney Lunar Festival 2025, the City of Sydney has committed around $2 million to support the delivery of the 19-day festival. The funds include all aspects of a festival of this scale including: decorations, artwork, promotions, activities, events, crowd control and security,” a spokesman said via email.

Everyone loves a spectacle: the lion dances are great, the night markets popular, there’s Chinese balloon art for the kids. There’s almost three weeks of taxpayer-funded spectaculars starting January 30.

But shouldn’t we be seeing some public celebration of our colonial heritage, too?

No. City of Sydney Council is marking January 26 - with the Yabun Aboriginal festival.

The tone of Yabun is shown by the Land Back book launch, described as: “Aboriginal land rights recognition in 1983 came after nearly 200 years of violent colonial dispossession and the near-complete loss of land. For over 40 years, NSW Aboriginal people have worked to restore their Country and people.”

The Council allocated $840,000 (over four years) for the Gadigal Information Service Aboriginal Corporation (who runs Redfern’s Koori Radio) to put Yabun on January 26.

The Yabun Festival has a stack of other sponsors including the NSW Government, several sub-agencies of the NSW Government and the Federal Government.

They are all pouring your tax dollars into an event that ties celebrating Aboriginal culture with demonising British Colonial heritage - as if you have to hurt one people to build up another. As if we can’t celebrate both.

They also sell merchandise.

You hear a lot about “Welcome to Country” (this is MY land, you’re a visitor), “Survival Day” (we survived YOU), and the hostile “Invasion Day”.

We are not being taught to celebrate Aboriginal culture. We are being taught to hate our British colonial foundations.

We have the Invasion Day protest and march on January 26. Amnesty has issued an activist toolkit condemning any celebration on that day.

Colonial heritage is now only ignored or demonised on its founding day. Almost every year now, a Captain Cook statue is vandalised - and he wasn’t even on the First Fleet.

Captain Cook statue cut down in Melbourne in 2024. Pic: ABC

Cook statue vandalised in Randwick, Sydney, 24 January 2025. Pics: 9News/2GB

What you don’t hear is any gratitude for the good things the British brought, starting January 26: running water from a tap, paved roads, the wheel, metal and glass, roast lamb, and an Enlightenment culture that respected reason over superstition and the rights of the individual protected by law.

Is it not racist to ignore the cultural patrimony of these people who gave us so much, vilifying their arrival as a day of mourning?

Couldn’t we use taxpayer funds for some theatre, art, dance and historical dress-ups, to celebrate the best of the Colonials? Perhaps some re-telling of their stories from those wild first days?

What about Governor Arthur Phillip and Bennelong?

Or how the settlers tried to farm the Hawkesbury? How they set about importing the finest sheep to breed, and vineyard expertise from France?

They wanted to make the greatest settlement they could in a place as alien to them as Mars is to us. They tried so hard to make the best of it. When a peach tree bloomed in Sydney for the first time, it made the front page of Australia’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette.

The British did not come like Spanish Conquistadors to loot and pillage and destroy. They were the Enlightenment culture that ended slavery. There are multiple, repeated proclamations in the early colony for settlers to treat the natives well. They wanted to learn. They brought botanists. They were careful to document and study, draw and measure the intriguing new species of plants and animals never seen before in England or Europe. It was an age of discovery and wonder.

What about the stories of how interested the Aborigines were in the new foods that the British brought? They had never seen melons before, or cows, or bread.

What about the bushrangers, or the warring Aboriginal factions who scandalised the colonists with their knock-down drag-out battles in the middle of town, spearing each other over incomprehensible quarrels?

Or the exploits of Musquito, or the time Aborigines threatened to kill all the white settlers at Cowpastures? There was blood on both sides, and also co-operation.

Index from the Sydney Gazette, State Library of NSW

A fair celebration of Australia Day, January 26, would include the positives of British Colonial heritage as well as Aboriginal culture.

This year there will be some Australia Day events organised by the Australia Day Council of NSW in and around Sydney Harbour. City of Sydney Council has contributed a $450,000 grant over three years to this.

The program is HERE.

There will be the ferry race. There will be a dawn reflection (guess what that is), with the Opera House sails lit up (with Aboriginal artwork). There will be an Aboriginal WugulOra ceremony.

There will be a citizenship ceremony, because Sydney is all about migrants on Australia Day - except the British from 1788.

There will be fly-overs and wheelchair races and a live concert with some classic Aussie hits plus some diversity and some Aboriginal performers. The list is here.

What there won’t be (as far as I can see) is any celebration of colonial heritage, except for one hat tip on the Harbour. From 1pm to 1.30pm, the Tall Ships will race from Bradley’s Head to the Harbour Bridge. Perhaps that will be politically-corrected in future. Enjoy it while you can.

It’s not like Australia ignores indigenous people such that January 26 needs to be overwhelmed.

In every festival, Aboriginal people are included prominently. The Sydney Festival has 10 events in the Blak Out program including Plant a Promise from 22 to 25 January, plus a weaving workshop on the 18th.

There’s Blak Powerhouse 2025 (on Australia Day), also funded by City of Sydney.

There’s a week-long Aboriginal festival in April: Short+Sweet Deadly 2025, amplifying First Nations voices in theatre and dance.

Eventbrite has a good selection from February on with Aboriginal Bushfood walks, grant writing workshops, weaving workshops and information sessions.

In July we have the big national one: Naidoc Week and a supplementary National Indigenous Art Fair at The Rocks.

That’s just a small selection. You can search yourself on any day you’ll find something, somewhere, generously funded by arts grants.

Perhaps we are being taught to hate colonial heritage for reasons that have nothing at all to do with celebrating Aboriginal people.

Powerful global interests such as corporate lobby group World Economic Forum (now meeting in Davos) have deliberately undermined national sovereignty in the West for years. They have built parallel governance structures and trained crops of Young Global Leaders to advance their agenda of Stakeholder Capitalism.

It was clear that corporations in blackface were using Aboriginal branding to further this ideology when they pushed for The Voice referendum, as I reported on HERE.

Globalists want to replace democratic law-making with unelected bureaucracies that set regulations. That way corporations can use public-private partnerships to write the rules they want, to benefit themselves, at the expense of your individual rights - which come from the Enlightenment culture brought by the British colonists.

Are you surprised that these exact traditions are demonised?

The WEF aren’t the only ones hoping to tear us down. The Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood have inserted themselves, hoping to use Aborigines to advance their cause, as I documented last year HERE.

To take a nation you must first destroy its culture and tear down its history. Then you can replace it with whatever new thing you want.

If we don’t think we have any right to our own country, and can’t organise because we’re too busy fighting each other, then we won’t be able to resist these outside pressures.

Whatever it is, it’s cultural cancer. Destroying history is toxic - so let’s celebrate the Colonials, if only to annoy Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore.

UPDATE: Today, after publishing, news broke that another Captain Cook statue was vandalised, this time in Randwick, Sydney. New picture added.

Vandalising Cook statues is not showing support or respect for Aboriginal people, it’s just a dog act: you don’t tear down one group’s heritage from to appreciate another.