2026-01-22
The Fantasy Of Australia Day
By Brittney Henderson, Victorian Greens Candidate For Western Metro
It’s that time of year again.
I’m writing a statement again.
I’m racking my brain for something profound to say, but it’s all been said before.
It’s 2026.
January arrives, and with it the ritual: board up your social media, check in on your family, and bunker down for one of the scariest seasons to be a Blakfella.
Around and around we go, trapped in what feels like a competition to see who can spew the most heinous racist filth under the guise of patriotism. I never had much faith in community guidelines, but January exposes just how weak they really are.
When I was in school, I desperately wanted to believe in the narrative that resurfaces every year, the well-meaning comment for unity and reconciliation. We should have a day for everyone, they say.
It’s a neat story, polished over decades, carefully and deliberately packaged to feel reasonable.
I’m embarrassed to think of how badly I wanted to believe in this unobtainable celebration of difference and community as a child. What continues to be ignored is how this narrative offers racists a disguise, a distraction, one that functions as a tool to idealise assimilation. It unlocks a pipeline where difference is tolerated only if it is eventually erased.
I tie myself in knots trying to understand how so many people in this country can hold similar stories of parents and grandparents who lost language and culture out of fear and discrimination and grieve that loss, while simultaneously demanding that same pain be inflicted on others. How does one hold both these truths?
When difference is shamefully and systematically stripped away, I’m not sure what’s left to celebrate. At what point do we stop dressing up trauma and isolation as “earning your stripes”? Does it feel good to punch down? Does it feel less lonely?
Is that what ‘Australia Day’ is really about: choosing to love your captor because it is scarier to feel the pang of social isolation?
I struggle to reconcile this devotion to ‘Australia Day’ with its origins: fundraising for World War I, a war built on government lies to working-class Australians and colonial loyalty to foreign kings.
When I first spoke out against ‘Australia Day’ at 18 sharing information about the first day of mourning protests more than 70 years ago, I received my first death threat. The cover of ‘Australia Day’ gave boys at my high school social licence to call my family every violent stereotype imaginable. Words they would never have gotten away with suddenly became acceptable because I had “transgressed”.
I chose not to punch down. It does not feel good to dance on the trauma of my family, of my friends.
Mob have always resisted physically and spiritually. There are powerful stories in this state of Aboriginal people fighting being literally shackled, camping outside schools to protest school exclusion and segregation of their children, and building community organisations because safety existed only in our own hands. We have always resisted, and we have always had allies: those who wrote to governors in horror at bayonets used on Aboriginal children, those dismissed and ostracised as “friends of the natives.”
History remembers those people kindly. Not those who romanticised oppression or pledged loyalty to the Crown.
I won’t appeal to the moral senses of those unwilling to sit with truth-telling. I long for a time when mourning is no longer drowned out by the loudest and angriest voices. When January no longer triggers a fight-or-flight response. And when we finally understand that diversity and community can never be genuinely celebrated on a day built on the pain and loss of Black and Brown people.