EDITORIAL: Australia’s remarkable story is one to celebrate

The story of Australia is a remarkable one.

It is a story that stretches back tens of thousands of years, through millennia of Indigenous stewardship to its more recent history as a European settlement to its evolution today as a modern, vibrant and multicultural land.

It hasn’t always been a happy tale.

Like all nations, Australia has dark chapters in its history.

The price paid by Indigenous Australians for European settlement was great. Many are still paying the price of that legacy of dispossession and discrimination, through shortened life expectancy and reduced economic opportunity.

The White Australia policy is another stain on our national story.

Unpleasant as they are, these are parts of our story that mustn’t be skipped over or brushed aside.

Indeed, these dark chapters make it all the more remarkable that Australia stands in 2025 as the world’s must successful multicultural nation.

Today, 30 per cent of Australian residents were born overseas, and half have at least one overseas-born parent.

Though our cohesion has taken a battering in recent months and years as foreign conflicts inflame tensions at home, we remain on the whole a nation unified by the common values of egalitarianism and respect for one another. It’s a trait which has long made us the envy of the world, no more so than now, as other nations threaten to crack under pressure from mounting divisions.

That’s not to say we all agree on everything.

Indeed, we disagree on many things, frequently and ferociously.

Including when and how to best celebrate the overwhelming success of the ongoing Australia project.

On both sides, views are fervently held; those who believe that to celebrate our nation on January 26 is to celebrate a genocide and those who believe that to change it would be a misguided attempt to re-write history.

It’s fitting that Australia’s national day has become one of our most hotly contested cultural battlegrounds.

After all, we’re a nation of scrappers, who aren’t afraid to go into bat for what we believe in.

Both sides of the debate are driven by a desire to make Australia the best place it can be and to celebrate its successes.

That’s a good thing. As we continue to confront with our history and grapple with how to reconcile the good with the bad, it’s a debate we should embrace — respectfully and never forgetting that we are all working toward a common goal.

Australia’s astonishing success as a prosperous, safe and inclusive society demands to be celebrated.

How to do that in a way that recognises all aspects of our history — good and bad — while also giving us hope for the future is a wicked question, and one which we are yet to answer.

So we’ll keep arguing, keep debating, all working towards an even greater Australia.

Responsibility for the editorial comment is taken by WAN Editor-in-Chief Christopher Dore