They wrap themselves in Southern Cross and flag, these prophets of a purer, smaller land, who turn the ache of ordinary men to borders drawn by blood and frightened hand.
Hanson stands before the Senate’s light and speaks of Asian floods and Muslim threat, the same tired sermon, thirty years refined — a nation narrowed to what she won’t forget.
Roberts counts the climate’s numbers wrong, denies the science, sovereignly, with pride, makes ignorance a kind of patriot creed and calls the drowning world a globalist lie.
Anning found his “final solution” phrase and said it in the chamber, straight and clear — not stumbled into darkness but walked in, then asked us to be grateful he was here.
Joyce crossed the floor to find his people, traded the Nationals for Hanson’s tribe, the farmers’ voice become a bitter echo, principle exchanged for angrier jibe.
Then Sewell and his Lads, their symbols sharp, their Roman salutes beneath the Southern sky — as if the men who fell at Tobruk, Kokoda, had not gone precisely there to die.
Cottrell with his mock beheading staged for cameras and converts, hate made art, Hersant raising Nazis from the dead on Anzac morning, in a public park.
Saleam, oldest ghost at this dark feast, still selling what the White Australia sold — a door slammed shut on half the world’s face, the same cruel policy, simply old.
What is Australia, then, if not the sum of every ship that docked and every tongue that shaped this continent’s improbable tongue, the ten thousand origins of one?
The Wiradjuri knew this country’s name before a fleet arrived to rename it all. The Chinese miners, the Afghan cameleers, the Jewish refugees, the ones who crawled
from burning Europe, from the camps, the holds, from poverty and famine and despair — they made the bakeries, the factories, the unions, the suburbs, the medical care.
The fair go was never about whiteness. The mateship was never a members’ club. The courage at Gallipoli was borrowed from twenty nations in the selfsame mud.
So when they speak of values, what they mean is values minus — minus you, minus him, minus the mosque, the temple, minus the voice of everyone who prays in a different hymn.
They call themselves Australians, true and pure, but purity was always someone’s lie. The only thing more Australian than the Welcome is the stranger walking in beneath that sky.
These unAustralians, loud with borrowed grief, would shrink the country to their fearful dream — a nation built on exclusion, calling it home, a river dammed until it cannot stream.
Let them be answered, not with matching hate, but with the names they’d rather we forget: Aunty Isobel, Faith Bandler, the Dunera boys, each wave of those who haven’t given up yet.
Australia is not finished. Not yet small. Not theirs to wall and narrow and define. The oldest continent holds older memory — and welcomes, still, whoever crosses its line.
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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, July 2026
