BOTANY BAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 60, 8 September 1937, Page 12

BOTANY BAY

BAN ON PAGEANTRY

THE SYDNEY ESCUTCHEON

(From "The Post's" Reprosentativo.) SYDNEY, September 2.

All the wicked skeletons in Australia's cupboard o£ history are to be banned from the "dignified" one hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations. An official Van on reference to convicts or bushrangers in pageantry for the celebrations has met with vigorous protests. "There is really no outstanding feature you can bring them into," said the. Minister in charge of celebrations (Mr. Dunningham), explaining the ban. To that one of the critics replied: "To impose a ban is to be like the ostrich with its head in the sand."

i ■ The Sydney University Librarian (Mr. H. M. Green), one of the leading authorities on our early days, ranged himself with the critics. "To gloss over an important part of our national history, simply tjecause to some people it doesn't seem 'nice,' would be good evidence, to as much of the civilised world as hears about it, that we are no more than sentimental barbarians," he said. "To stage a pageant of the landing from the First Fleet and exclude any suggestion of convicts, when the only reason for sending ships to Australia was to establish a convict settlement, is absurd. In any pageant which attempts to portray the development of Australia, it is impossible to ignore convicts, or even bushrangers. It cannot be authentic if the darker pages of the national story are to be torn out.

"It would also be unjust to ignore the many men and women whose labour and suffering went to the making of the nation. Convicts built the first roads helped the first explorations, and in the clearing of the land for settlement. It is to convicts, too, that the country owes some of its finest buildings. St. James's Church, for instance, was designed by Francis Howard Greenway, a convict, who vastly improved the architectural standards of the colony. William Redfern, transported to New South Wales, did excellent work as surgeon of the settlement." "The opinion of the literary committee of the Celebrations Council is generally quite opposed to any ban on convicts or bushrangers," said the chairman (Mr. S. Elliott Napier). "Convicts and bushrangers are important in the history of Australia. To leave them out because we dislike their background would be equivalent to leuving out all our defeats in writing the history of England. The bushrangers were an outcome of the strict penology of their time. From the point of view of national pageantry, they are much too picturesque to be excluded." ■ "It will be curious," says the Daily Telegraph," "to see how the pageant of the arrival of the First Fleet is presented without reference to the 771 convicts who were the guests of honour at Sydney's founding. And it is sad to think that the efforts of Mr. Ned Kelly to create .an Australian legend in the spirit of Dick Turpin or Billy the Kid have been so little appreciated by the.celebration's committee." ■