It began in 1787 when 11 ships carrying 775 convicts set off leaving homes and families.

In the nineteenth century, hunger, others’ greed and religious persecution were some of the factors that led flocks of people to emigrate from countries such as Ireland, Scotland and Germany.

After World War Two, waves of emigrants came from Italy, Greece and Germany, often scarred by their experience of war and persecution.

More recently, Vietnamese, Cambodian, South Sudanese and other people have fled war, persecution and famine in their home countries.

Unless we are Indigenous, at some point, our predecessors left their overseas homelands.

Undoubtedly in their journey to Australia, your family at some point lost a homeland, lost family and lost culture.

The migrant story is inevitably one of loss.

One of the greatest of these losses however, is the break with the past.

In moving thousands of miles, families have lost their own story, their own history, and a connection to a place. It’s this loss that can lead migrant communities to cling even tighter to their national identity.

But, then, we did exactly the same to others, but on a far greater scale.

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

We took 60,000 years of history, of continuous culture, and disregarded it. We flung aside an astonishing culture and tried to supplant it with out own.

But the culture which we brought was not homogeneous. It was an uneasy coalescence, lacking a national vision or a unified identity.

It was also young. Our families can only have been here for at most 230 years.

This is a flicker in the eye of time. We recognise this, and cling tightly to the stories we do have – the gold rush, Federation, Gallipoli – because humans need stories. We need a sense of who we are in time and space.

Our connection to place is so tenous that we grasp desperately at the straws of a national identity to avoid admitting that we are in some ways rootless, a society that has coalesced haphazardly without unifying identity over the past 230 years.

One straw we are grasping is January 26.

In some ways, it is insignificance itself. For most Australians our families came much later. But for Indigenous Australians, the day must have the stench of death.

What our predecessors did was wrong, but it’s a weight of guilt we cannot bear. 

What is wrong now is that we let the impacts of their action linger, with Indigenous people suffering from poverty, preventable disease and the effects of intergenerational trauma.

We cannot hope to celebrate our nation on a day that alienates any portion of its members, let alone its oldest members, its members who have lost the most, its members who have lost so much.