Celebration of Anniversary Day to 1900

Abstract

'Most countries and colonies have their peculiar annual rejoicings, but we know of none', declared the Sydney Morning Herald in 1848, '... where a greater abandonment to pleasure and diversion is evinced than in Sydney on the 26th of January.' However extravagant, this boast captured in essence the way Sydney's non-Aboriginal inhabitants celebrated Anniversary Day for most of the nineteenth century. This annual summer holiday was the official anniversary of the foundation of European settlement at Sydney Cove – the 'birthday of their nation'. But that beginning, as a penal settlement, was problematic. Sydney's newspapers on Anniversary Day sometimes invoked the convict past, but only to emphasise contemporary achievements. Celebrating Sydney crowds eschewed ritual re-enactments of their colony's murky birth for the sunlit possibilities of the holiday at hand.