Australia Day by Stan Grant

Australia Day

by Stan Grant

'As uncomfortable as it is, we need to reckon with our history. On January 26, no Australian can really look away.'


Since publishing his critically acclaimed, Walkley Award-winning, bestselling memoir Talking to My Country in early 2016, Stan Grant has been crossing the country, talking to huge crowds everywhere about how racism is at the heart of our history and the Australian dream. But Stan knows this is not where the story ends.

In this book, Australia Day, his long-awaited follow up to Talking to My Country, Stan talks about our country, about who we are as a nation, about the indigenous struggle for belonging and identity in Australia, and what it means to be Australian. A sad, wise, beautiful, reflective and troubled book, Australia Day asks the questions that have to be asked, that no else seems to be asking. Who are we? What is our country? How do we move forward from here?

Praise for Talking to My Country:

'A story so essential and salutary to this place that it should be given out free at the ballot box' The Australian
'Deeply disturbing, profoundly moving' Hobart Mercury
'Grant will be an important voice in shaping this nation' The Saturday Paper

Talking to My Country won the 2016 Walkley Book Award and the Special Award at the 2016 Heritage Awards, and was shortlisted in the 2016 Queensland Literary Awards, the Nib Waverley Library Awards and the 2017 ABIA Awards.

Reviewed by gazmanic on

4 of 5 stars

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Declaration of Country

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We need to write a new declaration: a Declaration of Country.
It does not speak only to Indigenous people, it does not speak to Britain or the homelands of those migrants who have made their way to these shores.
It speaks first to this land, this place here before any human footprint, this place that is our home.

A nation is not just a set of laws. A Nation is above all a story, a never-ending story of us. It is the story of a land steeped in time, awaiting people from many other lands,
who in time will call themselves Australians. It begins with the first footsteps taken tens of millennia ago, and continues in the newest-born child of this land.
It will live on in those still to come. A Declaration of our Country must speak to us all. It should speak to our sense of place: our home.

It should be the work of poets. It should stand alone, apart from the constitution. Its words should be carved in monuments to fall from the lips of children not yet born.

When the political debates of our age are past, there will always be our country. Our challenge - all of us - is to live here and call it home; our nation this thing of the soul.
...

"
The first people touched this land as our continent was being formed.
They came in boats whem humanity had yet to cross an open sea. Here they formed a civilisation that continues to this day.

Their birthright was never been ceded.
Those people live still in their descendants.

We enter into their heritage and respect their traditions.
We honour too those who have come from other lands and carry with them their cultures and faiths.

Through our bonds may strain, we seek to live together in harmony.
Though we may disagree, we find no enemy among us.

We cherish the foundations of our nation, and our rule of law and democracy.
We abide by the will of the majority but defend the rights of the minority.

We are all equal in dignity.
Opportunity is for all.

Worth should be measured not in privilege.
By our efforts we prosper. In a land of plenty, we care for those without.

From the first footsteps to the most recent arrival, this land is our home.
Here, together, we form a new people bound not by the chains of history but committed to the future forged together.
"

This is my Declaration of Country, my song of this country.
For that is what lasts.

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  • 11 May, 2021: Reviewed