Why Did Some Australians Celebrate on 26 January 1938 While Others Mourned?

Australia, One Record at a Time · Season One, Article 5

On 27 December 1937, the Yorta Yorta leader William Cooper circulated a letter in the name of the Australian Aborigines’ League. He asked church leaders to preach about the treatment of Aboriginal people on the Sunday before 26 January. He also notified them that a Day of Mourning would be held on 26 January, at the same time as white Australians celebrated 150 years since Europeans arrived.

The letter matters not simply because it registers discontent. It rearranges the meaning of a national anniversary. The official calendar pointed towards arrival, settlement and progress. Cooper’s circular pointed towards dispossession, restricted rights and lives controlled by government boards. These meanings did not begin colliding only in recent decades. By 1938, Aboriginal organisers had stated clearly that one date could carry fundamentally opposed historical experiences.

To read the record well, it is not enough to ask what happened. We must also ask who had the power to set the theme of public commemoration, and who had to find another room and print another document before their history could enter public space.

How a celebration produced its counter-record

Sydney marked the sesquicentenary on 26 January 1938 with a parade, sailing regatta, lawn bowls and a re-enactment of the First Fleet’s arrival. The celebrations presented colonisation as the opening scene of a national success story. The city itself became a stage for that account.

The re-enactment required people to play those who had supposedly been “discovered”. Aboriginal men were brought from Menindee in far-western New South Wales to perform the role of the Eora people of 1788. Meanwhile, Aboriginal people organising a real political protest had to wait until the official parade passed before walking silently from Town Hall to Australia Hall. When they arrived, they were required to enter through the back door.

That material detail says more than an abstract disagreement. The national celebration could incorporate Aboriginal bodies as spectacle while directing Aboriginal political voices to a rear entrance. One group was used to complete a picture of colonial beginnings; the other demanded attention to the conditions created during the following 150 years. Who appeared at the front and who spoke only after the ceremony had passed formed part of the record of power in 1938 Australia.

Not a silent people suddenly given a voice

The Day of Mourning should not be narrated as the moment white society discovered Aboriginal hardship. It culminated years of Aboriginal organisation. Cooper established the Australian Aborigines’ League in 1932. William Ferguson and Jack Patten established the Aborigines Progressive Association in 1937. The League pursued a petition to the King seeking Aboriginal representation in the Commonwealth Parliament. The Association investigated the operation of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board and brought forward statements from Aboriginal residents about reserve conditions and administrative coercion.

In January 1938, Patten and Ferguson published Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights. It addressed housing, education, wages, legal status and the consequences of “protection” policy from an Aboriginal perspective. The organisers did not wait for others to summarise their grievances. They created their own means of communication at the loudest moment of the official celebration.

About one hundred people attended the conference on 26 January. Jack Patten chaired it, and speakers included William Ferguson, Doug Nicholls, William Cooper and Pearl Gibbs. The conference adopted a resolution protesting 150 years of callous treatment and calling for new laws and policy that would bring full citizen status and equality in the community.

The vocabulary belongs to its time. A present-day reader will notice the period’s language of civilisation, advancement and assimilation, as well as the constraints within which activists had to frame their demands. Later changes in language should not obscure the agency they asserted. They presented themselves not as passive recipients of welfare but as organisers, authors, editors and proponents of policy.

An archive does more than prove that a protest occurred

Cooper’s circular, the conference resolution, the pamphlet, photographs and press reports make the Day of Mourning traceable. Yet these records do not occupy equivalent positions. Government files often described Aboriginal people as a population to be administered. The activists’ materials allowed Aboriginal people to define the issue, state their objectives and control the political space in which they met.

Only four non-Aboriginal people were admitted to the conference, including two police officers. This was not a refusal of public debate. In a society where white officials and advocates had long spoken for Aboriginal people, it temporarily protected a political space organised by Aboriginal people themselves. If an archive preserved only an outside reporter’s observations, a reader might learn how “they” were treated. The resolution and publications preserve what “we” demanded.

Three months later, Jack Patten edited the first issue of The Australian Abo Call. The newspaper declared that it would present Aboriginal affairs from Aboriginal people’s own point of view. It survived for only six monthly issues, but extended protest from a single day into continuing public authorship. Its pages addressed reserve conditions, wages, health, land and the protection system, while contesting the mythology of peaceful colonisation.

The archive is therefore useful for more than supplying a sentence to quote in a contemporary argument. It shows that political action is assembled from correspondence, meetings, travel, fundraising, printing and organisational relationships. Historical turning points rarely occur in one famous instant. They acquire continuity through many ordinary-looking records.

Why immediate institutional change did not follow

On 31 January 1938, a delegation of about twenty people met Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and Minister for the Interior John McEwen. They proposed Commonwealth responsibility for Aboriginal affairs, a dedicated ministry, Aboriginal participation in an advisory body, full citizen status and equality in education, labour law, workers’ compensation, pensions, landholding and wages.

The government did not adopt the plan. Lyons pointed to constitutional limits on Commonwealth power. The government also declined to send Cooper’s earlier petition to the King. Judged only by immediate legislation, the Day of Mourning could appear unsuccessful.

Institutional change, however, cannot be located only on the date of a statute or referendum. The Day of Mourning connected dispersed experiences into a national claim. It translated injuries inflicted through separate protection regimes into questions of citizenship, representation and administrative responsibility. Participants and organisations continued their work, and their networks contributed to the movement that campaigned for the 1967 referendum.

This does not mean that 1938 mechanically caused 1967, or that decades of struggle formed a smooth line of inevitable progress. It means an action can be rejected in the short term while changing the political language, practical knowledge and collective memory available for later action.

Why one date still cannot have only one meaning

Records from 1938 cannot dictate what every First Nations person or every Australian should think about 26 January today. There are different positions within communities, and forms of commemoration continue to change. The records do rule out one common misconception: contest over the date is not a recent invention or a political subject added from outside shared history.

When a nation chooses 26 January 1788 as the starting point for celebration, colonisation is already built into the commemorative structure. Mourning does not reject history. It insists that the same date hold consequences obscured by an official narrative of progress. Celebration and mourning coexist not because one side loves the country and the other refuses it, but because the question “when does the nation begin, and whose experience explains it?” has never been neutral.

A mature public memory may not dissolve conflict, but it should know where the conflict comes from. The circular and conference records remind us that commemoration is not passive recollection. It is a present decision about which experiences can become “our history”.

These materials also require cultural care. Collection pages warn that records may contain names and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and words no longer considered appropriate. Respect does not mean sanitising the archive into harmless text. It means identifying provenance, retaining context and placing First Nations voices at the centre of the account.

On 26 January 1938, celebration and protest occupied the same city. What survives is not merely evidence that two sides disagreed, but two national times: one counted achievement from colonial arrival; the other counted loss from the same moment and organised politically for a different future. When we read Cooper’s circular now, we encounter not a settled commemorative problem but a national record written long ago that still asks for a response.

Primary record and further sources

• National Archives of Australia: William Cooper’s Day of Mourning circular and transcript
• AIATSIS: the 1938 Day of Mourning, resolution, photographs and activist records
• National Archives of Australia: Aboriginal petitions and related records
• Trove: a 1938 page of The Australian Abo Call

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