A holiday swap proposal

Today is Wellington Anniversary Day, when we celebrate the arrival of the first settler ship in New Zealand. Probably not many Wellingtonians actually know that this is the occasion for their day off. And thereby hangs a tale and a political argument.

The Aurora landed at Wellington Harbour (then called Port Nicholson) with 148 emigrants and 21 crew aboard on January 22, 1840. Nowadays Wellington Anniversary Day is celebrated on the Monday nearest to January 29. We’re not entirely sure why.

The point is that this is an arbitrary sort of anniversary, which remains obscure to most of the people who observe it. In a way, it comes as a bit of a nuisance as well: it arrives just when most of us are starting to get used to being back at work after the summer break.

Wellington Anniversary Day is a day we don’t need at a time we don’t need it for reasons we can’t remember.

Other anniversary days are equally odd. Auckland’s day marks the date in 1840 when Governor William Hobson arrived on board the Herald and proclaimed British sovereignty over New Zealand.

In fact, he arrived in the Bay of Islands on January 30, not January 29, when the holiday is actually observed. This piece of daftness irritated some later politicians, and in 1894, a parliamentary committee recommended it be shifted to January 30. The Liberal Government declined to make the change.

Holidays, in short, are accidents of history and are hard to alter. But we need to make a change in our holidays, and provincial anniversary days would give us the chance to do so.

There is no national public holiday between Queen’s Birthday (early June) and Labour Day (late October). So we don’t get a national holiday during most of the long, dark winter months. We have to wait till well into spring for a break. What we need is a holiday in the depths of winter, when everyone is fed up and needs an excuse for a knees-up. We should have, in other words, a holiday somewhere about the end of July.

By then, we are cold and sick of everything.

The best way of making the reform would be simply to abolish all those meaningless anniversary days and switch them to, say, July 26. Wellington would give away its nice-but-unnecessary summer holiday in exchange for a desperately-needed feast at the darkest time of the year.

The regional holidays have no resonance in New Zealand, where the sense of a regional identity is not so strong that it needs a special anniversary. Of course, we cheer for our local netball or cricket team and each region knows in its heart that it is more beautiful and alluring than any other part of the country.

But we can think all that and support the local team without an unnecessary day off.

What’s more, none of the regional anniversaries lands during the bad winter months. So we would all gain by making this change.

The only remaining question is what to call the new national day.

Anniversary Day is a holiday we don’t need at a time we don’t need it.