Indeed, what lies behind the impulse to commemorate anniversaries of any kind? If a marriage is celebrated only on its anniversary, does not that mechanical response sound like grounds for divorce? Surely the best way to celebrate any anniversary is to re-enact the original experience in contemporary terms, that is, to do something now to remember later on.

What could have been less appropriate than Pompidou’s henchmen organising the centenary of the Paris Commune, since they were the political inheritors of the Versailles troops who had butchered the Communards and went on to sanctify their massacre by puncturing the city’s skyline with the monstrosity of Sacre Coeur. The real commemoration of 1871 had taken place three years earlier, in May 1968, when Paris had once again hosted a ‘Festival of the Oppressed’, Lenin’s term for revolution.

On those grounds, the best way to celebrate two hundred years of imperial rule over Australia would be to get rid of the US American bases, and see how far that act of independence carries us towards a reenactment of 1776.

Meanwhile, John Howard tells me I should celebrate my Anglo-Saxon heritage, by which he means the British Monarchy, the Australian Imperial Forces and a social monoculture. Not being of Anglo-Saxon descent, I find his approach offends the memory of my grandmother who taught me to sing ‘they’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the Green’.

To the part of me that aspires to be an historian, Howard’s proposition is not so unattractive. For instance, I am more than happy to turn popular attention of the British Monarchy since republicans have long gained support from retelling the biographies of kings and queens, and here I recall ‘The Bad Alphabet for the Use of the Children of Female Reformers’ where ‘K’ stands for ‘Kings, Knaves and Kidnappery’.

A thorough study of the British Royal Family could also justify multiculturalism since the house of so-called Windsor results from the interbreeding of French, German, Dutch and Greek lines, to name but a few.

Yet Howard is right to say we should not apologise for being descended from Anglo-Celts. British has always meant multi-cultural in Australia with the Irish, Scots, Welsh and Cornish as well as the English. Moreover, the Anglo-Celtic political heritage is one in which I take pride, as a republican, a unionist, a Marxist and a democrat.

What more inspiration can a republican want than the example of the Cromwellian parliament chopping off King Charles’s head? What sounder lineage can strikers establish than the tradition begun by the Tolpuddle martyrs and their trans­portation to Van Diemen’s Land in 1834 and which continues into 1988 with Mancunian shop stewards?

Despite the last two decades of Frenchification, Marxism is another outgrowth of British experiences starting from Engels and his Condition of the Working Class in England, the stimulation of Marx’s ideas about class struggle by Scottish Enlightenment historians. and the theoretical analysis in Capital depending on the realities of British capitalism. Lenin owed a similar debt to Hobson when he wrote Imperialism in 1915.

Britain’s contribution to Marxism has not stopped with its founders since the works of Raymond Williams. Juliet Mitchell, Edward Thompson. Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawn help Australians connect historical materialism with today’s political and intellectual issues.

Another strand of my Anglo-Celtic heritage which I am happy to celebrate at any time is the centuries old battle for democratic rights that led to habeus corpus, trial by jury and the rule of law. These rights have often been observed in the breech yet they were won and retrieved by countless thousands of radicals from the Levellers through the Chartists and on to the anti-fascists.

Of course, these progressive components of our British heritage are only one side for, as in Australia, there have been two traditions, starting here from the division between floggers and flogged.

The split within the Anzac tradition has, thanks to the work of Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years and the memoirs of Bert Facey, raised the significance of the first AIF into an ideological dispute between warmongers using the Gallipoli legend to link Australia more firmly to the USA military machine, and anti-war groups mourning that so much courage and self-sacrifice was squandered on behalf of what Archbishop Mannix called a sordid trade war.

Such disagreements pose the meaning of patriotism and nationalism, terms that are too often thrown at the political Right as insults rather than being championed by progressives as embodying our needs. The result of the left’s failure is that supporters of endless woodchipping pass themselves off as patriots, while sycophants for US American domination expropriate the support that belongs to those aiming at independence. Who showed the greater love of Australians: those who championed conscription or those who thought 60,000 dead was enough?

The Right’s claim to monopolise the monarchy, an Anglo-Saxon heritage or the Anzac tradition needs to be contested at every turn until those issues are fought out on grounds advantageous to a progressive hegemony.

Hence, the most depressing Bicentennial slogan I have seen is ‘1788-1988: Two Hundred Years of Oppression’ — a defeatist recipe for the next two centuries as well. Other groups who find nothing to like in 1788 have decided to commemorate ‘Two hundred years of struggle’, thereby bringing into prominence aspects of Aboriginal and European experience that the Bicentennial Logo Authority has ‘overlooked’. Struggle and oppression need to be matched with memories of victories.

Celebrate by all means, but celebrate events that crack open the official forgetting at a birthday party by stirring up those social differences which have been needed to make Australia a far better place than it would have been if convictism had continued. conscription been enforced or the Communist Party banned.