Emily Brontë wrote of cowardice, I write of erasure. Australia was not born an immigrant nation, but hammered from exile’s forge and ancient law.

Australia is often hailed as ‘a nation of immigrants’. It’s a tidy slogan, conjuring images of hopeful arrivals stepping off ships into a blank landscape, eager to weave their dreams into a welcoming social fabric. The phrase was sanctified in Bob Hawke’s 1988 bicentennial speech, where he proclaimed: ‘In Australia there is no hierarchy of descent: there must be no privilege of origin. The commitment is all.’

On its face, noble. But peel it back, and it erases the lived reality of millions: convicts shackled as London’s refuse, the jailers who chained them, the settlers who scratched wool runs from dust, and the Aboriginal peoples whose law held this continent for eighty millennia before a single sail appeared.

Australia was not founded as an immigrant nation. It was founded as an exile nation – built by those who did not come freely, and by those who came not merely to live here but to build here. To reframe that sacrifice as ‘immigrant equality’ is to flatten history into a political feel-good.

Tribe One, the founding Australians, is our unvarnished core. This is comprised of the 162,000 convicts transported between 1788 and 1868, treated as chattel labour and flogged into earth graves; the jailers and redcoats who oversaw them, often scarcely freer themselves; the free settlers who arrived before the second world war, who bled into the red dirt and the cane fields; and the Aboriginal peoples whose presence pre-dated pharaohs and Caesars, drawn – willingly or not – into the new nation’s brutal beginnings.

By 1933, this Australia numbered 6.6 million, Aboriginal and settler alike. Their descendants number 12 to 14 million today – fully half the nation.

This wasn’t an immigrant story. Convicts, jailers, settlers and Aboriginal peoples didn’t assimilate into a waiting society – they forged one from nothing.

Any subsequent dysfunction of our society is not of our making.

As I wrote in my own poem Lawson’s Echo:

‘“We did the crimes,” the leader’s voice bewailed,

Yet here we were exiles, a people cast to hell.’

It captured the truth: we were a dysfunctional family. But families forged in exile often are. From Canberra’s vantage, it was easier to blame us – convicts’ descendants, bush families, Aboriginal stockmen – for our chaos, rather than admit the chaos was imposed from above.

It was policy that corralled Aboriginal people into missions, severing kinship. It was government that sent men to twelve wars while their families lived in squalor. It was the state that flogged our forebears into line and then sneered at their ‘criminal stock’.

And yet, from that squalor, we still fought – Boer, Gallipoli, Tobruk, Kokoda. Tribe One carried rifles abroad while the home fires guttered. A dysfunctional family perhaps, but one that still turned up when the bugle called.

Hawke’s ‘no hierarchy of descent’ was not a slip of the tongue. It was a deliberate balm, a pivot towards multiculturalism wrapped in egalitarian language, a false comfort. But in that one line, the sacrifices of Tribe One were erased.

From the convicts whose chains became our foundations to the settlers who coughed out their lungs at Wittenoom. From the Aboriginal bones scattered across massacre sites, or finally counted in 1967 when ninety per cent of the country voted Yes to humanity, to the soldiers who buried 100,000 Anglo-Celtic sons under foreign flags. All were flattened into ‘commitment’. All written over as if they were just another wave of immigrants.

The immigrants who came later and arrived after the war – Italians with their vineyards, Greeks with their cafés, Brits with their turbines and trams – were vital to building the next stage of the nation. Their sweat and hope enriched the scaffold already standing. But scaffolds don’t build themselves.

By 1945, Tribe One had already hammered out the frame: mines at Kalgoorlie and Broken Hill, rail snaking across the east, wool and wheat, cities gridded, parliaments humming, armies blooded. Post-war immigrants came to join a nation in motion, not to found one from scratch.

That doesn’t diminish their graft. But it is not the same story. And here is why the myth matters.

Insisting that Australia is simply ‘a nation of immigrants’ carries real dangers. It erases the trauma of exile, the frontier wars, the industrial graves and the military sacrifice that built the nation immigrants joined. It frays the foundational bond between Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic Australians by reducing them to oppressor and victim, when in truth both bore the lash of Canberra’s indifference.

And it allows politics to pretend that everything before 1945 was mere prologue – that nationhood began only with immigration, not with exile and dust. That is not unity, that is erasure.

This is not to slight the post-war waves. Their story is real, their contribution valued. But it is not mine.

I am not an immigrant. My forebears did not step into opportunity; they were cast out of empire, lashed, broken, and worked into graves. They buried their sons at Gallipoli before Hawke ever spoke of ‘no hierarchy of descent’. They built the scaffold that others later climbed.

Half the nation – some 12 to 14 million of us – still carry Tribe One’s inheritance. Convict, jailer, settler, Aboriginal: the dysfunctional family that made a country.

No immigrant’s soul have I. And neither do the millions who still carry that truth in their bones.