Twelve Australian hip hop artists have collaborated on a new track calling for Australia Day to be moved, and released it with a 360 degree video in partnership with Indigenous TV channel NITV.
The track – which features the Herd’s Ozi Batla and Urthboy, L-Fresh the Lion, Hau of Koolism as well as Indigenous hip-hop artists Kaylah Truth, Nooky, Birdz (Nathan Bird) and Tasman Keith, alongside Tuka and Jeswon of Thundamentals and Erica and Sally of Coda Conduct – gives voice to a growing campaign to move Australia Day from 26 January.
Since 1994, the national public holiday has marked the 1788 arrival of the first fleet of British ships – a date referred to as Invasion Day or Survival Day by some Indigenous Australians.
The lyrics of the track – a collaboration between NITV and record labels Elefant Traks and Bad Apples – address the stolen generations, Indigenous incarceration, deaths in custody and other effects of white colonisation.
“Sick of fucking waiting for reparations, we pacing / Invasion and stolen children keep a country so complacent,” raps Gumbaynggirr artist Tasman Keith.
In his verse, Nooky – who won the $20,000 Dreaming prize last year – refers to Ms Dhu, the 22-year-old Aboriginal woman who, in 2014, became the 340th Indigenous person to die in police custody since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody concluded in 1992. In December a coronial inquest heard that Ms Dhu had endured “unprofessional and inhumane” treatment by West Australian police.
“Go and have a look at what they did to Ms Dhu,” raps Nooky. “My people die now who benefit? I might burn a flag for the hell of it.”
Northern Territory-raised artist Birdz says: “Black lives turn to black matter / Clap sticks clap to the rhythm of a cocked-back hammer clap bang / Here go another officer locking up another one of us like a popular fun thing to do / Another genocide on the BBQ.”
The protest track follows another released in August by Indigenous hip-hop duo A.B. Original. That song, titled January 26 and featuring Dan Sultan, was the lead single of the duo’s politically charged debut album, Reclaim Australia, described by Guardian Australia’s Andrew P Street as “a savage broadside at our national culture”.
In September 2016, Australian youth broadcaster Triple J – who frequently play many of the artists behind Change the Date – announced, after mounting pressure from listeners, that they were considering changing the date of their annual song poll, the Hottest 100.
The station’s content director, Ollie Wards, told Guardian Australia in September that “sometimes the majority has to stand up for the minority”, and confirmed there would be “some sort of clarity” on the issue by October 2017, after a year of consultation.
“I don’t want this to be a big discussion in the media at the moment and then have it disappear until people start wondering about the Hottest 100 around this time next year,” Wards said at the time.
In Change the Date, Kaylah Truth – a Meerooni artist of the Gurang nation – calls the Hottest 100 broadcast on Australia Day a sign of national division. “Annual – black family at the march, while my white fam celebrate on the charge / Got the Js on the tunes, holiday’s an excuse, BBQing and booze, patriots coming through / Do I start the convo, or will it kill the mood?”
In the lead-up to this year’s Hottest 100, another campaign has spread on Facebook for listeners to vote for A.B. Original’s track in this year’s poll. “By voting for a song which is both an explanation and rejection of the idea of January 26 as a day of celebration ... we have the ability to send a message to Triple J,” reads the page, which has 2,200 confirmed supporters.
