A regional New South Wales coffee shop that displayed a sign labelling Australia Day “National Dickhead Day” was vandalised and its owner sent death threats after pictures of the provocative message were posted on social media.
Matt Chun said a blackboard with the message in chalk was displayed for 15 minutes outside his cafe, Mister Jones, in the south coast town of Bermagui, the afternoon before Australia Day.
A picture of the board was uploaded to the Facebook group Meanwhile in Australia, with the caption “Your attitude is as bad as your coffee”.
It was reproduced on several Facebook pages belonging to rightwing nationalist groups and liked more than 700,000 times, Chun said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that has been liked by 13,000 people and shared more than 3,000 times.
He arrived on Tuesday morning to find “the door locks to my business had been drilled out and the windows glued shut”.
His inbox was full of messages “containing unprintable abuse and describing group plans for physical attacks”, he said.
“My voicemail account has mercifully reached capacity and I’ve long stopped listening to the graphic and explicit death threats.”
Chun, a professional artist, said he and his customers had also received online threats of “vandalism, arson, murder [and] mass violence”.
Despite the furore, or because of it, 26 January was his busiest Australia Day on record.
“The provocative blackboard seems innocuous now, entirely disproportionate to the scale of the hatred,” he said.
“Indeed, taken on face value, the blackboard was possibly the most Australian thing that one could write about ‘Australia Day’, in a country that claims to be proud of its ‘larrikin’ irreverence and self-effacing humour.”
The message was intended to be lighthearted, but he stood by its sentiment that Australia Day was “a singular atrocity”.
“Celebrating January 26 at best trivialises – and at worst glorifies – the invasion of this continent, declaration of terra nullius, massacre and attempted genocide of its 30,000-year-old Indigenous population,” he said.
“It is a day spent reveling [sic] in the mindless perpetuation of old myths and the clumsy fabrication of new ones. It is no accident that ‘Australia Day’ has been so effectively co-opted by an extremist minority as a thinly veiled anniversary of white privilege.”
