Once again on this divisive day of national celebration, Australia’s leaders can be expected to indulge in official monologues of self-congratulation based on assertions of who we supposedly are as a country and a people.

Notwithstanding the perennial affront to many First Nations people’s sensibilities each 26 January, Australia will officially talk over the protests to cast itself as a tolerant, inclusive, egalitarian, self-sufficient, ruggedly individual nation of mates – always underpinned by a reverence for democracy and a hardy streak of anti-authoritarianism.

The truth is that many of these traits are not and never have been unique to Australia or its peoples. But all nations tell stories to themselves – and this is the national narrative of the (white Australian) federation of 1901 that grew from violent dispossession after the tall ships arrived as the apex of invasion in 1788.

Were we to celebrate the national birthday at federation we’d have just turned 125. Hardly part of the old world to be sure, though still disappointingly in too many ways one of its colonial extensions politically and culturally.

Australia is hardly a neophyte nation either. Celebrated from federation as a new beacon of bold democracy within the British empire and a bastion of rights (not least for workers and female voters but never for Indigenous people), but 125 years later we seem more empirically shackled than ever.

Australian republicans have long sought to break the chains with Great........

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