Australia day, what has it got to do with 1819?

Yesterday the white Australians celebrated Australia Day, the day the white Europeans invaded Australia and robbed the aborigines of their land and their culture. The white Australians are damn proud of this day. They would tell you about the brutal massacre of the aborigines when they invaded this land. While the original natives of Australia opposed this day as a day of joy and celebration, the recalcitrant PM Malcolm Turnbull refused to budge, claiming that ‘It’s a day that should unite us…I think Australia Day has become a great national celebration of everything that is magnificent and wonderful and unique about Australia. We should cherish it.’ Were genocide magnificent and wonderful? What about the robbing of the land from the natives? Such insensitive and arrogance of the white Australians were repeated by former PM Tony Abbott who said, ‘What happened on the 26th of January 1788 was on balance, for everyone, Aboriginal people included, a good thing.’ Quotes from an article by Jonathan Pearlman in the ST on 26 Jan 18.
 
To the aboriginal people of Australia, 26 Jan ‘is a day of mourning and protest’. To them it is a day that ‘marks the beginning of a destructive period with consequences lasting till this day.’ According to an indigenous leader, a Pastor Ray Minniecon, ‘It was a deliberate invasion of our people,…The massacres, the genocides of our peoples from this country and we’re still suffering form the aftermath of that brutal history.’
 
The celebration of Australia Day, similar to the Americans celebrating Thanks Giving Day or the day Columbus invaded America and did the same cruel things to the native Americans, would never be celebrated by the natives that were massacred and robbed of their land.
 
Singapore is going to celebrate the bicentennial of 1819 in less than a year. What does this date signify to the people of Singapore? Is it a day for celebration like what the white Australians are celebrating the Australia Day? Or is it a day to remember how the white colonialists came to Singapore and claimed it as theirs? Stamford Raffles proudly proclaimed that he had founded Singapore for the British Empire! Were there massacres of the natives when Raffles landed, or he just took the land as a part of the British Empire?
 
What would Singapore and Singaporeans be celebrating comes 2019? Some may be thankful to the British for their good life here today. Their poor immigrant forebears were given a chance to live here. But their forebears would not have to be so desperate if the European colonialists did not invade their home countries and looted everything, resulting in extreme poverty and forcing them to leave their mother land. For the few forebears that survived, many perished in their homeland, along the journey in rickety boats to reach Singapore, many died in oblivion while trying to work and to live as decent beans, all because of colonial conquest of their mother land, just like the natives of Australia and other conquered land.
 
It is important to know your history or you will be worshipping murderers, thieves and gangsters.