In the 19^th century, hunger, social greed and religious persecution were a few factors that led flocks of people to emigrate.

Later waves fled war and political persecution, poverty and famine in their home countries.

All came to an unfamiliar land. Unless we are Indigenous, at some point our predecessors were uprooted to be replanted here. At some point, your family likely let go of a homeland, family and culture.

The migrant story is inevitably one of loss. In moving across the globe, some families have forgotten their story, their connection to a place.

It’s this grief that can make migrant communities cling even tighter to their identity of origin.

But migrant communities have also given the same grief to others, on a far greater scale.

Australia’s early settlers took land, took children and brought devastating diseases.

The settlers took 60,000 years of history, of continuous culture, and disregarded it, flung aside in an attempt  to supplant it with another.

But the culture those settlers brought was not homogeneous. It was an uneasy coalescence, lacking a national vision or a unified identity. It was also young.

Two hundred and thirty years is a flicker in the eye of time. Our connection to place can be so tenuous, we grasp desperately at the straws of a national identity without admitting that we are in some ways rootless.

One straw we are grasping is January 26.

In some ways, the 19th century is insignificant. For most Australians, our families came much later. But for many Indigenous Australians, the day has the stench of death and destruction. What our predecessors did then was wrong, but it’s a weight of guilt we cannot bear now.

But what is most wrong in our modern times is that we let the impacts of their action linger, with Indigenous people still suffering poverty, preventable diseases, and from the effects of intergenerational trauma.

How can we hope to celebrate our nation on a day that alienates any of its members, let alone its oldest members, its members who have lost the most, yet who have so much to help enrich us as a nation?