The controversy over the commemoration of Australia Day on 26 January is becoming more intense each year, and has led commentators to suggest alternative dates. Among the alternatives offered is 9 May, the date on which the first Commonwealth parliament sat at Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building in 1901. The date of federation itself, 1 January, is mostly discounted because it falls on New Year’s Day. These debates about national commemoration echo in some ways those conducted in the years immediately following federation, though the Indigenous perspectives that inform contemporary criticism of 26 January were absent from earlier discussion. A striking similarity between today and the early twentieth century is the failure of federation to assert itself as an occasion for national commemoration. This paper traces early debates about how the creation of the Commonwealth should be celebrated, using official records and newspaper accounts. It follows the futile effort to establish 1 January as ‘Commonwealth Day’, and the inability to agree on an alternative date. In seeking to account for the political and popular indifference to instituting a formal commemoration of federation, the paper returns to the historiographical issue of the impetus for Australia’s creation. John Hirst and Helen Irving argued around the time of the centenary of federation that there was far more sentimental motivation for federation than had previously been acknowledged. But if the federation was made by sentiment as much as commercial interest, how could that sentiment have vanished so quickly?