On Thursday, a large group gathered in town to listen to why Australia Day’s date of January 26 should be changed and why the day was often called Invasion or Survival Day. 

“January 26 is not Australia Day, because people shouldn’t celebrate genocide,” Bermagui’s Rodney “Murrum” Kelly said.

Leading the rally Mr Kelly, a descendant of a Gweagal warrior shot by Captain Cook's marines as they landed in Botany Bay, said to Indigenous Australians the date meant massacres, waterholes being poisoned, people being forced off their land or hunted like wild dogs. 

After the British fleet arrived in Sydney in 1778, Mr Kelly said the local people were dispersed all the way down the coast.  

“Any land we lived on, they’d just hunt us off. We’d go somewhere else and they’d come again,” he said.  

“There’s still families out there where this happened to their great-great-great-grandparents. They still feel that in their hearts, because they know it happened to their grandparents.” 

He mentioned the Australia Day massacre, also known as the Slaughterhouse Creek massacre, of January 26, 1838 where from 60-300 Indigenous Australians were reported to have been killed. 

Yuin women Faith Aldridge of Bega and Joy Kelly of Cobargo said to them Australia Day was also about survival. 

“We can’t celebrate Australia Day because that’s the day we got invaded,” Ms Kelly said. 

But 17-year-old Yuin teens Amylee Kelly and Tekeisha Thomas of Bermagui said while they were not fans of Australia Day, they did not think it should be moved to a different date. 

“I guess you have to put up with it because it’s there,” Tekeisha said. 

“It’s just like any other public holiday, it’s the day that it’s on. But I would prefer it to be called Invasion or Survival Day.” 

Amylee said it was a day that brought people together, but for the wrong reasons.

Mr Kelly said Indigenous Australians are continuing to be disadvantaged, with governments cutting support funding or taking away land for mining. 

“Today is Survival Day and we will survive for thousands and thousands of years to come,” he said.