The Uluru Statement from the Heart, though successful in uniting Indigenous peoples, should be re-examined. The key document in the voice referendum held last year, it insisted in poetic language that all Indigenous peoples were bonded spiritually to the specific homeland where they were born. Their souls or spirits “must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors”.

A shock to these affirmations of spirituality was delivered by the census held nationwide in 2021. It revealed that the Uluru Statement was preaching a myth. In fact, most Aboriginal Australians today are not worshippers of an Indigenous religion. In the Northern Territory, still viewed as a stronghold of the ancestral religion, 94,000 of its Indigenous peoples are Christian and only 3400 worship an Aboriginal religion. Across the nation as a whole, fewer than 2 percent of the Indigenous people declare that they worship an “Australian Aboriginal traditional religion”.

Australian Aborigines are more Christian than the mainstream Australians who live in the capital cities.

Most of these Aboriginal Christians probably would not conceive of themselves as primarily victims of the so-called Invasion Day. After all, it was this so-called invasion that, year after year, spread the very religion they worship. Indeed, the Torres Strait Islanders were so grateful for the arrival of the London Missionary Society in 1871 that they still designate it not as Invasion Day but as the Coming of the Light.

I am thankful to Geoffrey Blainey and his article in The Australian – Australia Day A Time to Reflect on the Country We Call Home for most of the information in this article.