Our People

Homily for Australia Day Mass 2006

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
26/1/2006

Between 1788 and 1850 over 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia in 806 ships. The first eleven of those ships are known today as ‘The First Fleet’ which set out in May 1787 with 759 convicts, their Marine guards, some with families, a few civil officers and inadequate supplies. Most Australians think the First Fleet landed in Australia on 26th January 1788. In fact the Fleet arrived at Botany Bay between the 18th and the 20th January; but lack of fresh water and good soil meant that the fleet moved North is search of a better place to found the colony. Was 26th January when they arrived in Sydney Harbour then? No, Captain Arthur Philip first planted his foot in this parish on 21st January and established his camp: hence its name to this day, ‘Camp Cove’. But our area, too, was deemed inhospitable and so the fleet moved on, all the way into Sydney Cove.

On board HMS Sirius was Robert Watson, a seaman later appointed signalman and then Harbour Master, who was eventually rewarded with a grant of this inhospitable land later known as ‘Watson’s Bay’. That boat went next to Norfolk Island to establish a second colony, which I have had pleasure of visitating canonically this past week. I was delighted to discover that Norfolk Is has several connections to us. The colourful Irish convict, Sir Henry Browne Hayes, who was transported for kidnapping a young woman, bought most of our parish in 1803 and built a house which he named after Petrarch’s house ‘Vaucluse’. Hayes committed several further misdemeanours and was sent for further punishment to Van Dieman’s Land and ultimately to Norfolk Is. By a strange twist of fate Norfolk Island’s recently returned commandant, Captain John Piper, bought the then-vacant Vaucluse House; his lands were to include a point which is named after him to this day. In due course a young Australian explorer and barrister who had been born on Norfolk Is in 1790 bought and extensively enlarged the house and he is buried nearby: his name was William Charles Wentworth and he is remembered as one of the Fathers of this nation and of this suburb, as he one of Norfolk’s most famous sons.

Our First Reading this morning from the prophet Isaiah promises us a fertile and secure land. It is on the face of it a strange choice for our country’s Feast Day, given how right from beginning of settlement through to today our land has been a hard one, marked more often by drought and bush fire than excessive fertility. Strange, too, to the promising peace when our first settlers were so often under the lash and our subsequent population have been so often involved in wars. Indeed those who chose today’s readings tidied them up somewhat by omitting Isaiah’s prediction in the very next verses that the plenty of the land would not last, and that in due course both city and bush will both be ‘utterly laid low’. Likewise the editors left out the immediately preceding verses where Isaiah says: don’t get complacent girls, whatever the men are saying to you; things might be great this year, but next year vintage may fail, they may be no harvest, the land will be desolate, growing only thorns and briers.

When we Australians sentimentalize about our Sunburnt Country, as we are inclined to do at times like Australia Day, we can easily forget how brutal this land can be, with its drought, heat-waves, fires, floods, cyclones. We can also forget the brutality with which this land was won for its settlers, the cost to those who came before, the continuing tensions about our identity than bring fears of riots on our beaches this very day. Beneath the surface Australia is not quite so pretty as the Scripture postcards suggest!

Our Gospel passage for today—from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—is equally paradoxical. We hear the Beatitudes so often we can easily fail to hear them. We can fail to notice what strange things Jesus is saying: Happy are the poor, the depressed, the weeping, the hungry. Ask those who have lost loved ones or houses or prospects through drought these years past or through bushfire these past weeks how blessed they feel in their poverty, thirst and mourning! Likewise Jesus says the meek, the merciful and the peacemakers are blessed. Yet being a peacemaker is not a very satisfying job in our world at the moment either: just ask the young Australian servicemen and women in various war-zones and dangerous peace-zones… To cap it all off, climax to lesson, Jesus says: Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely: rejoice and be glad!” Well, we might say, thanks very much, but keep your blessings, we’d rather have the curses.

Yet the lesson of our readings and of our hard land seems to be, in the end, hope. Isaiah’s thought is: if things are great, great: just don’t be too smug, too complacent, because it won’t necessarily last; if things are bad, don’t despair, don’t presume they’ll always be: remember God can raise you out of the lowest ditch, the worst drought. Jesus, too, is talking to people who feel pretty low, unloved, abandoned, powerless, and telling them: you are not forgotten; God will be there for you.

And so with reverent gratitude towards our people and our land we work with God to make Australia a better place. As our Second Reading from St Paul suggested, we all have different ways can contribute. We delight in the good things about our country and work with God to cure its evils—even as we know that heaven is our true homeland and it is its values of unselfishness, meekness, justice, mercy, pure-heartedness and peacemaking that most matter. To the extent that those values are instantiated in our country, to that extent we are truly a lucky country, a graced county. Let us pray for more of that great grace!