OFFICIAL BAN

Hokitika Guardian, 20 September 1937, Page 7

OFFICIAL BAN

SYDNEY PAGEANTRY .REFERENCE TO CONVICTS. SYDNEY, Sept. 2. , All the skeletons in Australia’s cupboard of history are to be banned from the 150th anniversary celebrations. An official ban on references to convicts or bushrangers in pageantry lor the celebrations has met with vigorous proteats. ‘•'there is really no outstanding feature you can bring them into,” said the Minister in charge of the celebrations, Mr Dunningham, when 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.” The Sydney University librarian, Mr H. M. Green, one of the leading authorities on the early days, ranged himself with the critics. “To gloss over an important part of our national history,’ he said, “simply because to some people it does not 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. , “Exclusion Absurd.” “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 the clearing of the land lor settlement. It is to the convicts, too, that the country owes some of its finest buildings.” Further Opposition. “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 leaving 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 Celebrations Committee.” s jij .vs ”2 UiMSSt