In Australia, every year we find ourselves inexplicably marking our national day of celebration on a day that has considerable pain attached to it for Indigenous people. This is not only enormously insensitive, it also normalises historical and present-day wrongs committed against our First Nations people.
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Nothing we do now will rectify the loss that European settlement in Australia has caused First Nations people, but what we can do now is be an ally to Indigenous people, rather than an accomplice to the atrocities that have been perpetrated. We can advocate for equality, respect, recognition and inclusion of Indigenous people, we can listen to what they have to say on issues that concern their lives and our country, and we can follow their lead.
Part of being an ally to First Nations people means not celebrating a traumatic event in their history that is associated with generational harm - a day Indigenous people often refer to as Invasion Day and a Day of Mourning.
We live in a resilient country on a spectacular continent and we should celebrate what it means to be Australian - but January 26 shouldn't be the day on which we do it. Australia Day should be formally changed, but Australians do not need to wait for a formal change to make a personal change in how we perceive and mark January 26.
In my childhood I celebrated Australia Day with a barbecue and a visit to the beach. I watched the tall ships - a re-enactment of the First Fleet - on the harbour many times, along with millions of other Aussies, without giving it much thought beyond the gliding of the ships under the Harbour Bridge.
I celebrated the Bicentenary in 1988 as a child, waving the Australian flag - marking 200 years since the arrival of the First Fleet into Sydney. It wasn't until I was a young adult that I started to question celebrating the arrival of Europeans in Australia, and what that meant for our First Nations people. I worked at a community legal centre in Sydney on Indigenous issues and then spent time working with the Wik people in Aurukun Aboriginal Community in far north Cape York, where I saw the devastating impact of white settlement on Indigenous communities.
The last Australia Day I celebrated was as an adult. I was at Darling Harbour, waiting in the crowd of people for the fireworks. Children were sitting on shoulders playing with their parents' hair, lifting hats off heads that had been there all day to shade red faces from the summer sun. Hands grasped white bread filled with sausages and charred onions, smeared with tomato sauce. There was laughter as wrists bangled with multi-coloured illuminated plastic strips waved in the night sky.
I stood there that evening, waiting like everyone else for the fireworks to "celebrate" being Australian. Then what had felt sort of wrong for many years suddenly felt unbearably wrong. I was standing in a packed crowd celebrating the trauma of First Nations people in this country.
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I turned around with enormous discomfort and went back into the building. The fireworks started and I could hear the cracking and murmurs of awe from the crowd, the cheers every so often, the playing of the standard Australian classic songs on the loudspeakers, and the communal drawl of the crowd as they sang along off-key. I went home.
I have been in the city on Australia Days since, and my eyes always catch the Aboriginal flag perched atop the Harbour Bridge next to the Australian flag, as though hoisting a flag up there will make the unacceptable seem acceptable and only a short distance away, I have attended the Survival Day event in Victoria Park.
Australia can do better than celebrate the establishment of white settlement in Australia every year, a development that caused multigenerational and pervasive loss to Indigenous Australians which is still felt to this day. I hope to celebrate Australia Day again, but as an inclusive, diverse community on another day, when all Australians can feel part of our country and our future together.
Instead of celebrating Australia Day today, I'd ask you to use the day as an opportunity to reflect on Australia's deeply shameful treatment of and engagement with First Nations people. That is the best way to show love for this country, and for the people who lived here long before most of our ancestors ever stepped foot onto this beautiful continent.
- Dr Shannon Maree Torrens is an international and human rights lawyer. She has worked on war crimes at the UN international criminal courts and tribunals and holds a PhD in international criminal law from from the University of Sydney.