Two days from now is Australia Day, nominally the 26th January. The date commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet on that day in 1788, essentially the day that Australia was settled by white colonists (and convicts) from the UK.

As such, it has always been contentious for the First Nation peoples, who justifiably label it 'invasion day.' From their perspective, there is no other way of looking at it, since it was the day that dispossession began.

Australia Day has been celebrated on other days in the past and was only settled on permanently by all the states in 1935. Yes, more than three decades after Federation!

Prior to that there had been a gaggle of state-based days that variously commemorated local foundation days, such as Proclamation Day in South Australia (December 28), Foundation Day in Western Australia (1st June), the original Australia Day (1915) which fell on July 30th and yet another Australia Day date in 1916, which fell on the 28th July. Hardly consistent, don't you think?

So changing the date to a nationally agreed upon alternative already has a number of precedents in our recent past and should not be an occasion for bitterness or hand-wringing. If it means that the First Nations people's can be included in, or at least not repelled by, a brand new Australia Day, then who loses out? 

I don't have a particular date in mind (though best to avoid Cook's arrival in Botany Bay on April 29), but sometime in the spring or the autumn. Mild weather, mild attitudes.