The festivity is meant to be a celebration of the founding of modern Australia but has faced a backlash in recent years as more and more people consider it a day glorifying “invasion” and “genocide”. The January 26 holiday marks the 1788 landing of the First Fleet in Botany Bay, now Sydney. However, indigenous Australians regard the holiday as the beginning of a mass genocide of their people who have made their home on the continent for the last 50,000 years.
A growing number of young Australians across the country are sympathising with Aboriginal people but the government still opposes any change to the holiday.
The protesters invoked the black, yellow and red colours of the Aboriginal flag in their clothes and banners to label Australia Day as a date that symbolises “231 years of illegal occupation” and a “crime scene”.
Jayden Riley, a 17-year-old demonstrator in Sydney, told Reuters: “Today marks the start of colonisation and the start of genocide.”
The young Australian of Aboriginal descent explained the outcry was not about not being patriotic and not loving Australia but about recognising the plight of generations of indigenous people whose lives were turned upside down when Western nations colonised the country.
In May 1787, Captain Arthur Philip and his fleet of 11 ships left Britain to set up a penal colony Down Under.
They arrived eight months later in present-day New South Wales, an area famously discovered by Captain Cook in 1770.
January 26 marks the day the British flag was first raised in the new settlement and the date has been adopted for celebration since at least 1808.
Ms Riley said the protests were “not about refusing to celebrate being Australian”.
She added: “This day represents more than just being Australian to our people.
“My Nan’s stolen generation, for example, she was taken from her family and brainwashed to be a Catholic – all that sort of stuff.”
Ms Riley was one of about 5,000 protesters in Australia’s largest city who chanted slogans such as, “Always was and always will be Aboriginal land” and “No pride in genocide”.
Other Australian cities including Melbourne and the capital Canberra also saw thousands of people rally against the bank holiday.
However, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who faces a general election in May, said he did not want to change the holiday.
At a citizenship ceremony in Canberra he said the day marks qualities such as idealism and enlightenment which have prevailed in Australia over cruelty and dispossession.
But Australia’s 700,000 indigenous people are among the poorest of the 25 million citizens and they are asking more to be done to help them.
Lidia Thorpe, an Aboriginal former member of parliament told ABC News: “This country stops for a horse race, it stops for an Australia Football League grand final, it stops for the Queen’s birthday and it stops for an Anzac service and we don’t have ever a time where this country stands still to reflect on first peoples of this country and the pain and suffering we’ve endured since colonisation.”