IN A HARD-HITTING essay, award-winning Indigenous Australian writer Melissa Lucashenko argues that the nation’s talk of “social cohesion” masks deeper fractures rooted in colonial history and ongoing racial injustice. She contends that calls for unity often ignore the lived realities of First Nations people. Lucashenko traces a continuum from frontier massacres and child removals to contemporary racism, policing harms and online abuse, insisting these are not historical remnants but present-day conditions. She warns that assimilation is too often repackaged as harmony, while structural inequality remains unaddressed. True cohesion, she argues, cannot be achieved without confronting colonial violence, acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty, and pursuing justice through truth-telling and meaningful reform. Without that reckoning, she suggests, Australia’s unity will remain fragile, selective and built on denial.
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