While on holiday this year I was musing on Australia Day and the penumbra of discontent that surrounds it. I was staying at a house overlooking the beach and the mouth of a tidal creek, an Aboriginal midden close by. The first Australians who for millennia gathered here to eat have long since been driven away.
The news was full of anger and suffering — bomb blasts in Turkey, plaintive appeals for humanity on Manus Island, refugees drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, an ill-tempered and ominous transition to power in the United States, unceasing bombings and deaths in Syria, and the harrowing of the Rohinga in Myanmar.
And in Australia, constant sniping at minority groups, including Indigenous Australians, asylum seekers and young offenders. A cacophony of calculation, hatred and neglect.
The beach scene could not have been more different. Red and blue umbrellas like mushrooms and pavilions dot the beach. Families mark out their square of sand. Grandparents and young parents introduce their babies to the sea, watch their young children play in the waves, take somnolent part in games and beach cricket and soccer open to all comers, attend to the discipline of sun hats and cream, and look on as their older children and friends master the waves and explore the subtleties of friendship.
It is a festival, a celebration of love, spontaneity, of connection and play, oblivious of the people who for millennia had here gathered mussels and shellfish and eaten plentifully.
The enjoyment of the holidays did not cancel out or soften the mayhem, muddle and malice of the public world and the people whose lives and happiness are so destroyed by them.
It held in mind the images of death and diminishment, but set them on a canvas of thanksgiving for the ways in which kindness and humanity are embodied in people's lives and are passed on, for the strength and delicacy of relationships that we take for granted, and for the gift of a beach holiday that is an impossible dream for so many Australians, and would be unimaginable for others who associate beaches with death and incarceration.
At the beach it seemed natural simultaneously to honour the Indigenous Australians who had for so long gathered happily to eat together, to acknowledge the invasion and occupation of their lands that had wiped them out, and to feel shame at the continuing marginalisation of Indigenous Australians today.
"National days invite us to allow these