Celebration of Anniversary Day to 1900

'Most countries and colonies have their peculiar annual rejoicings, but we know of none', declared the Sydney Morning Herald in 1848, '... where a greater abandonment to pleasure and diversion is evinced than in Sydney on the 26th of January.'1 However extravagant, this boast captured in essence the way Sydney's non-Aboriginal inhabitants celebrated Anniversary Day for most of the nineteenth century. This annual summer holiday was the official anniversary of the foundation of European settlement at Sydney Cove – the 'birthday of their nation', as one Sydney newspaper put it in 1852.2 But that beginning, as a penal settlement, was problematic. Sydney's newspapers on Anniversary Day sometimes invoked the convict past, but only to emphasise contemporary achievements. Celebrating Sydney crowds eschewed ritual re-enactments of their colony's murky birth for the sunlit possibilities of the holiday at hand. Celebration in the early decades Anniversary commemoration had been relatively low key at first, an initiative of the colony's élite. In 1818, Governor Macquarie marked the colony's thirtieth anniversary with greater pomp. There was a 30-gun salute and military review, a dinner for civil and military officers, and, in th