We cannot hide from Australia Day [pub. The ABC, Australia Day 2025]

Finding reality.

A version of this piece edited by the truly remarkable Scott Stephens and titled ‘Australia Day is the most morally complicated day on the calendar — we mustn’t shrink from that complexity’ appeared in the ABC’s Religion and Ethics section on 25/2/2025. It can be read here.

For many years I felt that Australia Day was not a day to celebrate. The term Invasion Day felt more apt.

The plight of Australia’s Indigenous population is a blight on our nation, not just in historical terms but in light of the current circumstances in which they continue to suffer. This alone made it clear to me that the practice of celebrating this country has and will continue to be mired by our failure to repair the damage we have done, and continue to do, to this land’s traditional owners.

The over-arching question then remains:
— is it even possible to repair this damage?

And with regards to our rights or ability to celebrate this country, the question of Australia Day then becomes:
— if we cannot repair this damage, to what extent can or should this nation be the subject of celebration?

The first and only Indigenous Australian student I met when I studied at ANU, Matt, was from Warren – a town 150km outside Dubbo. I remember another student telling me, soon after my arrival at Fenner Hall, an off-campus student residence, that Matt was on ‘some kind of scholarship’, this student then remarking on Matt’s white complexion. At a house party some time later, another student argued that ANU had too many scholarships on offer for Indigenous students.

These are two of the many instances in which I began to feel increasingly disturbed by a culture of rejection towards the advancement of Indigenous Australians. These anecdotal and shameful responses to Indigenous Australians were ratified by my studies. In Foundations of Australian Law, a subject taught by Indigenous Legal Academic Asmi Wood, we learned about how the law has been used as a weapon against Indigenous Australians. In April 1956, Charles Frederick "Boonie" Hilt, a 36-year-old Aboriginal man, was arrested in Bourke, New South Wales, for allegedly using indecent language towards police officers. Following his arrest, Hilt was involved in a ‘scuffle’ with two police officers at the station, resulting in severe abdominal injuries. He died two days later in the hospital. An inquest concluded that his death was accidental, attributing it to injuries "accidentally received" during the altercation.

I continued to learn about the myriad ways in which Indigenous Australians suffer from disproportionate incarceration rates and negative health outcomes over the coming years. The most disgraceful demarcation of our failure to reckon with the harm not just caused, but being caused to our Indigenous population, is the 20 year gap in life expectancy between us and them.

Over a decade on from the beginning of my education, and having seen successive governments pay lip service to the horrors that befall Australia’s traditional owners, I have a pessimistic answer to that first question. I do not think that we can repair the damage. Even if we were able to close the gap — even if we were able to magically ensure an equal quality of life to be shared by all Australians — the harm done to these people, the destruction of their cultures and their lands, cannot be undone.

Today is January 24, 2025, and I am stuck on that second question. Again. If we cannot repair this damage, to what extent can or should this nation be the subject of celebration?

For me, the answer to this question lies at the heart of one’s relationship with shame. Shame is destructive. Shame is corrosive. And as we are once again seeing, shame is divisive. The conversation around Australia Day seems split down the middle: either you reject shame, consign the destruction of our first peoples to the history books, and embrace pride in all the wonderful things that this country is, or you allow shame to inform your entire perspective on not just Australia Day, but your conception of the state itself.

Having taken an interest in the politics and affairs of many other nation states, I find myself straddling an uneasy balance. This country is an incredible place, a place that gave refuge my grandmother as the rest of her family were wiped out in the Holocaust. This country has provided me with healthcare when I was down and out. This country afforded me the services and opportunities necessary to rebuild a life after many years spent battling addiction and mental illness, and a legal system that gave me the opportunity to prove myself as worthy of freedom. This country compels me to vote, and is inhabited by people who regard littering as a cardinal sin. This country gives me the space to drive for a few hundred kilometres in any direction, spend a night or two in my tent with my dog, and gaze upward at starry nights that hold my soul like a pebble in the palm of a hand.

When I compare my experiences of this country — my family being given safe haven, myself having access to adequate medical resources, and my fair treatment before the law — I must acknowledge how different things might be if I had been born an Indigenous Australian.

I feel profoundly uneasy by the blind celebration of this country. And yet I feel incredibly proud of Australia — of being an Australian. And so, too, I feel profoundly resentful of those who have made it fashionable to regard this country as no more than its worst parts — a settler-colonial, genocidal extension of a far-flung monarchy. I want it both ways, or in typical millennial fashion, I want it all.

And I think I can have it. I think we can have it.

Perhaps a good man is a man who can see the truth and speak it with compassion. Perhaps a good country is a country that can see the truth, and speak it with compassion — from either end of the argument, whichever one falls. Perhaps a good country is a country that knows how wonderful it is, and how sordid; a country that is capable of honest appraisal.

Perhaps a good Australia is an Australia that consistently holds two truths at the same time; an Australia that uses shame not as a way out, but a way in.

In the words of Iris Murdoch, “the great task in life is to find reality.”

May you find yours, compassionately.