Good Friday seems perpetually under siege. First from shopping, then footy in New South Wales, and now in Victoria from gambling.
This progressive encroachment suggests two questions: What protection, if any, should Governments and business give Good Friday? How will the public marginalisation of Good Friday lead Christians to see and celebrate the day?
Changes in the public celebration of Good Friday have been significant. Sixty years ago shops did not open, few people worked, trains and buses hardly ran, there was no public entertainment. It was a long, quiet, heavy day. It reflected the historically large attendance at Christian churches and the place of Christian faith in the public space.
Now Good Friday is still largely a day free of work. But in a mobile Australia where Christian allegiance and practice are no longer taken for granted, it is a day for shopping, still restricted, and diversion. But when businesses like football, gaming and supermarkets test the waters of public response as they seek to exploit Good Friday, they now find their toes nibbled rather than bitten off.
The arguments for maintaining the exclusions associated with Good Friday are generally based on one of two considerations: respect for Christians to whom the day is sacred, and the benefits to society of maintaining a day free from pressure to work and to spend.
Neither argument is conclusive. The decline in meaningful Christian allegiance, and the growing number of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim Australians may lead us to ask why a Christian holy day should be especially protected. Even conceding the public benefit of days free from pressure, too, we may ask why Good Friday should continue to be such a day.
Perhaps it is helpful to ask the more radical question: why should there be any stable public holidays at all? Public holidays constantly forget or embroider their origins. They recall events which were significant to different groups in Australian society, even after the significance is no longer shared.
For many Australians the anniversary of the arrival of the first English settlers in Australia is no longer an occasion for joy, but it remains important to remember for its influence on Australia. Similarly, few remember the stonemasons' strike that in Victoria gives the date to Labour Day, but it rightly enshrines the importance of workers' struggle.
Anzac Day, too, has changed its character but like the other public holidays, its