It is a smouldering January in Melbourne again. The temperature climbs past forty as though it has somewhere urgent to be. A hot northerly wind sweeps down from the interior — straight from the red heart of the continent — arriving uninvited and overstaying its welcome. It prowls through suburbs and bush alike.
The gum trees stand brittle and resentful. They have endured months without decent rain; even sunlight seems dangerous now. One imagines a careless sunbeam striking bark with malicious intent. The air smells of eucalyptus and apprehension.
Television and radio announcers adopt their annual tone of grave foreboding. Total fire ban for the week. Experts line up obligingly on talk shows to explain that if a blaze begins under these conditions, it will be “impossible to contain.” . The maps glow red. The wind arrows point downward like accusations.
January 26th is the Australia Day, — a day that sits uneasily in the heat. For some, it is celebration: flags, barbecues, citizenship ceremonies, fireworks against a copper sky. For others, it is grief. A beginning that felt like an ending. A commemoration that sounds suspiciously like a wound.
Australia was not empty before 1788, though for many years history books behaved as if it had been politely waiting. For over 65,000 years — longer than most civilisations can imagine — First Nations peoples lived here, travelled this land, named it, sang it into memory. Their ancestors arrived after an epic migration from deep Africa and made a home in a continent the rest of the world had barely conceived of. Long before maps gave it borders, it had stories.
A day to commemorate Captain James Cook sailing the HMS Endeavour into Botany Bay, and claiming the eastern coast to be a New South Wales!.
Yet, this is not South Wales, new or otherwise. It does not resemble Europe; it does not soften itself for comparison. It is an ancient continent — half desert, half improbable lushness — harsh and generous in equal measure. It does not apologise for droughts. It does not exaggerate its rivers.
The First Nations peoples of Australia did not merely inhabit this land; they read it as text. Songlines mapped geography more accurately than many early charts. Fire was not always catastrophe but careful stewardship — mosaic burning that coaxed life rather than consumed it. Knowledge of seasons extended beyond four polite divisions; there were subtle shifts, insect cues, flowering signs invisible to the untrained eye. This was science expressed through story, observation folded into ceremony.
Their art carries this continuity. From the ochre handprints in Kakadu National Park to the luminous dot paintings of the Papunya Tula movement, the canvas is not decoration but archive. Concentric circles mark waterholes; lines trace journeys; patterns encode law and lineage. What appears abstract to an uninitiated viewer is in fact precise cartography of memory. Even contemporary Aboriginal artists, exhibiting in galleries from Melbourne to Paris, are less concerned with fashion than with fidelity — each brushstroke a continuation of an old conversation with the land.
The northern wind, meanwhile, is less forgiving. It arrives scorching and accusatory, rattling tin roofs and nerves alike. It reminds us — especially those who came later — of unease we rarely articulate. Migrants prospered here. They built houses, cities, lives. They planted roses in soil that had long supported wattles. Gratitude sits beside guilt like awkward dinner guests.
Did we flourish at the expense of those who flourished before us? The question lingers in the heat. It drifts between eucalyptus leaves and through suburban verandas where sausages sizzle on Australia Day barbecues. No one invites it, yet it arrives faithfully every January.
Perhaps the wind is not cruel, only honest. It strips away the comfortable illusions that history can be simple. It reminds us that this continent was never “new,” merely newly noticed by some. It insists that belonging is not a matter of paperwork but of humility. I often imagine first nation’s people building an ancient structure exactly where Opera house stands, wholly from blindly white sea shells that they have collected for 65000 years. Perhaps they would call it something else. It could be a structure to collect water. Who knows, the possibilities are endless. I imagine a perfect union, between the first nation and the second. A meeting place, the same but different at the same time.
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