I’ve always felt conflicted about today, “Australia Day”. I am so grateful to have been born in Australia, and to have so many opportunities and blessings that people in many other countries don’t have – and that, unfortunately, many people here, our Indigenous people, do not have.
Australia has a brutal history of invasion, land theft, stolen children and genocide, and many First Nations people still suffer from intergenerational trauma and systemic racism, and the impact of more than two hundred years of violence, dispossession, and denial of their existence and most basic rights. This is why an increasing number of people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, don’t find Australia Day a time of celebration – to too many it is Invasion Day, Survival Day, a Day of Mourning…
I love this country deeply, knowing I am of it, and glad of that. I feel connected to the land, having grown up on it, and proud of the wonderful achievements of its people. But January 26 represents so much pain and loss and injustice, more than two hundred years of persecution, cruelty, theft, and continuing hardship. And while I love this country and honour the land every day of the year, it is on this day that I struggle most. A day to celebrate being Australian shouldn’t cause so much hurt and damage to the First Australians. A day to celebrate this country should not take place on the day it was stolen from its Traditional Custodians.
So today I hope and wish and pray that *this* is the year we start to redress the balance, that the gap closes, that social injustice is addressed, that the apology becomes a foundation for real change and not just a nice memory, that our honouring of the land and its people extends to real, practical transformation, and I hope that soon a government will be strong enough and compassionate enough and fair enough to legislate the Uluru Statement from the Heart, so we can all move forward together based on truth, recognition and reconciliation.
I live on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and today, and every day, I acknowledge the Aboriginal peoples who are the Traditional Custodians of this country. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and future, and acknowledge that Aboriginal peoples are hurting and mourning on this day. I also acknowledge that Aboriginal peoples have a strong spirit of survival, having survived for over 60,000 years, and a deep connection to this land they have been caretakers of for so long…
A few people asked for any book recommendations, so here are the ones I read in 2020 by First Nations authors…
“Today we stand in footsteps millennia old.
May we acknowledge the traditional owners
whose cultures and customs have nurtured,
and continue to nurture, this land,
since men and women awoke from the great dream.
We honour the presence of these ancestors
who reside in the imagination of this land
and whose irrepressible spirituality
flows through all creation.”
Acknowledgement of Country by Jonathan Hill,
an Aboriginal poet living in NSW.
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