Submitted by Paul Daley on
Today is an annual festival of barbecues and slabs, and fetishisation of a flag that, with its Union Jack, symbolises violence and oppression to Indigenous people
Every year Australia Day gets bigger, more ostentatious and increasingly imbued with a brazen “kiss the flag”, “love us or leave us” territorial ugliness that eclipses a discomforting truth at the heart of our nationhood.
And that is: for the vast majority of Australians, this is someone else’s land. Always was. Always will be.
Related: Ten years on, Cronulla has learned its lesson. But has the rest of Australia? | Paul Daley
... the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians,” he said.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
Related: Australia Day: what makes us great, and what that greatness demands of us | Stan Grant
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