#AustraliaDay, celebrate your way

This Sunday, January 26, 2014 might be a normal day off for most of the world, but here it’s marked in the calendar as Australia Day.

These days, Australia Day entitles fun-loving Aussies to a mid-summer long weekend, and a wonderful opportunity to celebrate life in our great country in all its multicultural diversity.

Credit: Getty Images

This year, we at Twitter Australia decided to try something different. We thought it would be great to get massive numbers of Australians to tweet images of their Australia Day celebrations — all using the #AustraliaDay hashtag.

What if we could then display these Tweets in a real-time, public way to share with others across the country and worldwide, to proudly showcase what the day means to our nation? And what if we could store these Tweets and images for posterity — a collection of moments reflecting the diversity of our nation on this special day, side-by-side, Tweet-by-Tweet in a time capsule?

The answer is a special collaboration between @TwitterAU, The National Australia Day Council (NADC) and the National Museum of Australia (NMA) — an ambitious project designed to capture a digital snapshot of the entire nation celebrating Australia Day.

People from all walks of life, from celebrities to the everyday person, get a chance to be remembered together on January 26, 2014.

Tweets and images will be curated live by the NMA on Australia Day — appearing on live screens all over the country as well as on the websites of both @Nat_Museum_Aust (NMA) and @OzDay (your.australiaday.org.au). Selected images will appear in an exhibition in Canberra, with the museum also undertaking to store the images in a digital ‘time capsule’ for future generations. Of course, @TwitterAU will retweet #AustraliaDay images on Sunday too.

All of us participating in this unique collaboration are keen to see the #AustraliaDay Twitter project repeated each year, which will help the National Museum to build a multi-year document of a nation in constant evolution.

So let’s make history together. Have a fantastic celebration your way this special day and tweet as many images as you like, and be sure to include #AustraliaDay.

Let’s show our fellow Australians and people around the world just how bright our Aussie spirit can be.

 Enjoy the long weekend, Australia.