The Day That Wasn’t Always There
There’s a day Australia pretends has always been there — blue flags with the colonisers mark blaring out from the top left corner, long weekends, airbrushed history. But the truth is stranger, quieter, sharper. I love this nation. I also grew up with immense respect for its traditional owners and their customs. I didn’t grow up celebrating “Australia Day” every year though as it really never existed in the manner it does now . And if it did, it wasn’t celebrated in the usual manner considering where I come from - that being a wholly recognised Indigenous community. Yet now that I’m older, I understand why, considering the true history of our First Nations people was never taught in school. If it were, we would have learned that: the date didn’t belong to the nation, it belonged to the landing, to the taking, to the violence that followed, to the violence that endures, to the truth nobody wanted to face. The country didn’t choose 26 January as a day of c...