Habitual old stirrers can try to politicise Australia Day and foster differences if they like. It is a free country. Of course the stirrers could take one day off, leaving 364 days to play politics and make life miserable with their whiteanting.

Everyone else will be out celebrating with great joy, passion and dignity. Yay for Australia Day!

God I get sick of PC garbage.

Even in the worst most alcohol full rotting aboriginal settlement today, the life expectancy is almost double that of 1770 aboriginals. The Aboriginals were definitely the biggest winners of white settlement.

If you can believe any of the black armband history, & the census, their population has increased more in the last 40 years than it did in their first 40 thousand years.

Of course "prominent" aboriginals will try to keep this garbage going. How the hell else to they keep the gravy train running, & the trough full for them & their kin. The stolen generation was almost as big a fraud as global warming is today.

I don't give a damn when we have Australia day, or even if we have it or not. The way the country is now, less than 50% of the population is likely to respect Australia day, so why bother.

Whites should observe May 25, birthdate of William Nash who is thought to be the first White child born on the continent, the "Australians" can celebrate whatever has meaning to them since the word Australian no longer has any relevance to my people.

I nominate Paul Hogans birthday..the 8th of October for Australia Day

OTB: "Habitual old stirrers can try to politicise Australia Day and foster differences if they like. It is a free country. Of course the stirrers could take one day off, leaving 364 days to play politics and make life miserable with their whiteanting. Everyone else will be out celebrating with great joy, passion and dignity. Yay for Australia Day!"

My view is to keep Australia Day as is, because it's a great day (and I intend to go to the local Australia Day breakfast) but it also reminds us that Australia's history is complex, good and bad, and we need to remember and recognise this in order bring everyone together 'to celebrate with great joy, passion and dignity'.

If that makes me a habitual old stirrer in OTB's view, well, tough!

God I get sick of ignorant, racist garbage.

1. What was the life expectancy of Aborigines in 1770? Basically we don't know. There are plenty of elderly people in recorded prehistoric Aboriginal burial grounds, and surprisingly few children. The assumption that pre-European life expectancy was very low is just that, an assumption - they were primitive so they couldn't have lived long (maybe about the same as the British in 1778?). After European arrival life expectancy plummetted, and it has more recently been rising for a range of reasons. One factor is that people today are genetically tougher, descended from the relatively few survivors of smallpox, measles, flu, TB, venereal disease etc. that hit the Aboriginal population in the first 150 years. (The same thing applies to us Europeans, we are descendants of those who survived the medieval plagues such as the Black Death).

2. The identified Aboriginal and Torres Strait population in 2011 was 548,370 people. Estimates at contact for Aborigines are 300,000 to 1, 000,000 depending on how it's calculated. So today is roughly same as 1788. 40,000 years is about 1600 generations; archaeological evidence suggests intensification of resource use (some say agriculture) and rising populations at about 4000 years ago (possibly to much the same as at contact). I haven't got the figures at hand, but this means estimates of the total number of Aboriginal people are multi-millions.

3. So it's not garbage, regardless of your opinion of prominent Aborigines. The stolen generations is not garbage either, but that's for another post.

So: 'you don't give a damn when we have Australia day, or even if we have it or not. The way the country is now, less than 50% of the population is likely to respect Australia day, so why bother.'

If that's the way you feel, seems to me the problem is you, not other Australians, prominent Aborigines. or me (I like Australia day).