Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: I Love Australia

I love Australia, but I don’t love Australia Day on 26th Jan.

I don’t love that it is about a flag with a Union Jack on it.

I don’t love that it is a day where people drink heaps of booze and proclaim a kind of racist patriotism that calls this an incredible place because we have cultural traditions like lamington eating or thong throwing.

We live in a country where cultural traditions go back 60,000 years. Not 238.

I don’t love that we, the descendants of IMMIGRANT colonials won’t do something as simple as change the date. When we have been asked over and over again.

I don’t love that we are a settler country of white immigrants who now believe that the economic problems are because of immigrants. The ones who care for our elderly and our young. The immigrants who happen to be brown.

I don’t love that we don’t acknowledge that we took something that wasn’t ours to take, and every year since they unified the date, in 1994, we call that 32 years of tradition, but won’t acknowledge the tens of thousands of years of First Nation culture.

We said they weren’t here.

I don’t love that we celebrate the day we lied.

That we celebrate the day we stole.

I don’t love the day we started a narrative that made the first people of so-called Australia less than others. That made them primitive and wrong. That diminished the world’s oldest continuous culture. That took their land, and then took their children. That locked them up.

I don’t love celebrating the English, a conquering nation that colonised as a hobby.

I don’t love that we have a party on the very day this all started. The day of the beginning of genocide.

I don’t love this, because this is not the Australia I love.

The Australia I love is a vast and diverse place.

I love the glorious red of the desert and the deep wet mossy green of rainforest.

I love that 80% of our plants, mammals, reptiles and frogs are unique to Australia and are found nowhere else in the world.

I love our wild and glorious coastline.

I love our capacity for self-sufficiency, in food, in resources, in renewable energy.

I love the expansiveness of our landscape. When the canopy of stars stretches across the sky like a sparkling dome, and it feels like I am the only being on the planet.

I love that at 19, Evonne Goolagong Cawley won the French Open, the Australian Open and Wimbledon in the same year. She decolonised tennis and she wasn’t even 20.

I love that in 1983 the High Court found that UNESCO World Heritage status of the Franklin River gave the Australian government the constitutional power to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam. I love that this outcome was because of people like Bob Brown and a grassroots movement for the environment. It showed people could change politics from the ground up.

I love that we legalised same-sex marriage on December 9, 2017.

I love that I was there when Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, returned to Australia on June 26, 2024 after a 14-year legal battle. A truth teller who would not be compromised.

I love that on the September 25, 2000, the whole country came together to witness Cathy Freeman win the 400m gold medal at the Sydney Olympics.

I love that on February 13, 2008 Australia said sorry to the Stolen Generations through a formal apology by the PM to parliament and that from May 26, 1998 every year we commemorate the ongoing efforts towards reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

I love this Australia. Vast. Ancient. Unique. A place of healing and growth. A country that acknowledges how it came to be. That recognises the harm it has caused. But also the opportunity of working together for a better future. The Australia I love is sorry. The Australia I love is fair. The Australia I love is kind and compassionate.

The Australia I love wasn’t created on January 26, 1788.

Let’s pick another date.

One that celebrates and acknowledges an Australia we all love.

The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.