Thousands attend Invasion Day rallies on Australia’s national holiday as colonisation debates rages

With Australia increasingly uneasy about celebrating its national day, recognition of Indigenous people in the constitution has become a new flashpoint

Tens of thousands of people have marked Australia’s national day by attending protest rallies in cities across the nation, amid a rising political and social reckoning with the country’s colonial history.

Australia Day – 26 January – commemorates the landing of the British First Fleet of convicts at Sydney Cove in 1788, the beginning of the settlement that entrenched European colonisation of the Australian continent.