The Nation That Cancelled Its Own Kids

Australia, it’s often said, is a lucky country. Though in recent decades it seems increasingly unclear for whom exactly. Certainly not for the generation of children quietly coming of age under the creeping doctrine that to be born here — unless you are Indigenous — is to arrive guilty. Guilty of land theft, guilty of colonial crimes, guilty by mere association, which is a strange kind of inheritance for a ten-year-old to carry.

Yes, we are now two decades deep into the project of teaching children that their birthright is essentially illegitimacy; that their country, their home, their backyard, their school, their parliament — all of it is stolen. Not stolen like a snatched handbag. Stolen like some sort of vast, original sin that no amount of apologising or treaty-making or symbolic flag-waving can ever fully expunge. What a triumph of psychological sabotage.

One might think a nation may look back on its cultural institutions’ performance over the last twenty years and wonder whether it was really the best idea to set the foundations of children’s identity on a concept of permanent moral eviction. But no, that would require reflection — a practice now confined to yoga classes and overpriced bathroom mirrors. Instead, we press on with the message, delivered at school assemblies, on TV campaigns, in council acknowledgements, in museum exhibits, in the omnipresent drone of the "conversation we have to have": You don’t really belong here. Not properly. Not fully. Your citizenship is provisional, at best. So we have the curious spectacle of Australia’s youth being taught to parrot words like "unceded land" before they even understand fractions. These same children will later be told to "own their privilege," which is a useful trick if the goal is to induce shame and confusion rather than any meaningful comprehension of the past. The result is a national identity crisis outsourced to kids too young to order a coffee without parental supervision.

Of course, the adults behind this have the best intentions. (They always do. It’s practically their brand.) The idea, we are told, is about reconciliation. Recognition. Healing. Though oddly, it seems to produce ever-greater division, grievance, and alienation — not healing. One begins to suspect this may not be the self-esteem programme it was sold as. Meanwhile, the people who most fervently preach this gospel of inherited guilt generally live in postcodes not known for their diversity of thought. They congratulate themselves on raising "conscious" children, while outsourcing the job of keeping the lights on to others less afflicted by the need to apologise for existing. It’s a curious form of noblesse oblige: "We may have more money than you, but we’re definitely more ashamed of it."

But what of the psychological damage? That’s the bit no one wants to talk about. The creeping sense of unbelonging lodged in the minds of children who did not choose history, who did not write treaties, who did not build empires, and who cannot undo the past any more than they can undo their place of birth. How long until the narrative of ‘stolen land’ quietly becomes internalised as ‘stolen life’? How long until a generation no longer believes it has any right to claim a future here, let alone build one? Already we see it — young Australians uncertain of their right to celebrate their country, reluctant to express pride, wary even of the national flag lest it signal some unspeakable allegiance to something called "Australia" which, according to the more fervent voices, might be better off dismantled altogether. How healthy can this be?

And what of the children who arrived here from elsewhere? The migrant kids whose parents fled war, persecution, or poverty to give them a fresh start in what they were told was one of the safest, freest nations on earth? For them, the message is doubly confusing. In the home, they are urged to embrace Australia, to seize its opportunities, to belong. But in the classroom and in public culture, they are told this land is not really theirs to belong to. It leaves them stranded between two worlds — unable to fully identify with the country of their parents, yet subtly discouraged from claiming the one they now call home. This is not just an identity crisis, it’s a recipe for a fractured society where new Australians hesitate to develop pride in their country for fear of being told they have no right to it. Without pride, there can be no lasting sense of unity.

What nation tells its children not to belong? Of course, no one’s saying the truth shouldn’t be taught. No country’s history is pretty and nor should it be sanitised. But there’s a canyon of difference between teaching children to understand history and teaching them to loathe themselves by proxy for it. One is education, the other is cultural vandalism masquerading as virtue. Twenty years on, the dividends of this national experiment are becoming clearer. An anxious, fractured society. A generation less sure of itself than any before it, and a country still searching, ironically, for belonging — even as it tells its own children they have none.

But don’t worry. There’s probably a government-funded awareness campaign in the works to explain why this is all your fault too.