Australia Day: A Complicated kind of love (#509)

We were sitting at the dinner table at a hotel in Jaipur when my mate Tony, a true blue Aussie, asked:

What do you think about celebrating Australia Day?

You see, it was January 26, a public holiday in India when the population celebrates Republic Day, which marks a defining milestone in India's national journey . The day the Constitution of India came into force in 1950, formally establishing the country as a Sovereign Democratic Republic.

Australia Day is observed each year on January 26, marking the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788 and the raising of the British flag by Captain Arthur Phillip.

For much of the 20th century, it evolved into a national holiday celebrating federation, citizenship, and what many came to see as the birth of modern Australia. Parades, barbecues, fireworks, and citizenship ceremonies became part of the ritual.

But history, as we know, rarely tells a single story.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, January 26 marks the beginning of dispossession, violence, and cultural destruction.

Long before 1788, this continent had been home to thriving civilizations for more than 60,000 years. Among the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. The arrival of Europeans changed everything, often brutally.

That dual reality is why Australia Day now sits so uneasily in our national calendar.

And that’s where the complexity begins.

I’ve always found Australia Day to be complicated. I love Australia deeply. I’ve traveled widely, lived elsewhere, and still believe that Australia is one of the most extraordinary places on earth. Its landscapes, its people, its irreverence, its generosity of spirit. Every day, I feel lucky to have been born in Australia.

But loving a country doesn’t mean ignoring its past.

Long before Europeans arrived, the land we now call Australia had been home to First Nations peoples for tens of thousands of years. That is not a footnote. It is the foundation.

And when Europeans did arrive, they didn’t come gently. There were massacres, forced removals, disease, and cultural erasure.

Entire communities were destroyed.

Histories were silenced.

Lives were lost in ways that still echo today.

That doesn’t mean those of us alive now carry personal guilt for the actions of people long gone. But it does mean we carry responsibility for remembering, for acknowledging, and for doing better.

I’ve spent time in remote parts of Australia, standing on land that carries stories older than any city or institution we’ve built. When you do that, it becomes harder to reduce the conversation to slogans or social media outrage.

The truth is quieter and heavier than that.

Some people call January 26 Australia Day.

Others call it Invasion Day.

Both perspectives exist because history itself is complicated. I know Indigenous Australians who are deeply hurt by the date. I know others who shrug and say the calendar isn’t the point. What matters is respect, honesty, and how we treat one another now.

And that, I think, is where the conversation often goes wrong.

We turn it into a shouting match. Flags become weapons. Opinions become tribes. And nuance disappears entirely. Meanwhile, the real opportunity to reflect, to listen, and to learn, gets lost in the noise.

For me, patriotism isn’t blind loyalty.

It isn’t pretending the past was tidy or heroic.

Real patriotism is loving a country enough to tell the truth about it. To acknowledge both the beauty and the brutality. To celebrate what we’ve become while being honest about how we got here.

Australia Day doesn’t need to be abolished or defended with fury.

It needs to be understood.

If you want to fire up the barbecue, do it. If you want to reflect quietly, do that too. But maybe, just maybe, take a moment to acknowledge the full story:

• The ancient cultures that endured for millennia,

  
  

• The mistakes that followed colonization,

  
  

• The resilience of Indigenous communities, and

  
  

• The responsibility we all share to make the future better than the past.

Because loving a country isn’t about pretending it’s perfect.

Loving a country is about caring enough to help it grow.

And that, to me, is what Australia Day should really be about.

#bunyipsbooksbeyond