2019 was a pretty great year for me. I got married and finally made the move from renter to owner.

As the year started to wind down I was excited for what 2020 would bring.

I didn’t realise it would bring unprecedented fires devastating much of the nation.

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We spent New Year’s Day at my mother’s after leaving our house when fires closed three of the four roads out. We watched the reports and constantly checked our fires near me app to see how the fire was travelling. We watched it go from 29 hectares to almost 1,000. Luckily, for us at least, it spread away from our little coastal town and moved inland. It’s still burning as I write, although thankfully it has had its status downgraded from “out of control” to “under control”.

When I was only 17 I fought a fire on my family farm. It took several hours and cost us a few burns, but we won the day. Twenty-two years later and I was not so keen on fighting another, and with one child with asthma, we decided it was best to get out before the final road was closed. Luckily it never happened. The roads reopened the next day and we came home.

Many others have not been so lucky.

Amid the turmoil and panic and worry there have been moments of gratitude; gratitude for the firefighters, for the neighbours who have opened their homes to strangers displaced from fire, for the countless people who have donated money or goods to those in need. There has also been moments of anger at the inaction of government, the slow responses, the fumbled PR attempts, the disrespect shown to the victims and the heroes, the barefaced denial of reality, and the blatant lies being told to the public and repeated through the conservative media channels.

For many this response has been confronting and crushing. Many have shouted: “This is not the Australia we know.” But for myself and others, it is exactly the Australia I know.

Early within the bushfire season we saw efforts to pretend it wasn’t really that bad, and that it was just those damn inner-city elites complaining, as they always do (it wasn’t). As things got worse, we were told it still really wasn’t that bad and that it definitely had nothing to do with climate change (it does). Then we were told it is that bad, but it was all the Greens’ fault (it wasn’t). Then we were told the government is giving everything the fire services have requested (they haven’t).

Then finally we have been told the Coalition government has never denied climate change and its links to fires (they have, and do), just as various Coalition members went on air telling us that there was no such thing as climate change.

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I am not surprised by politicians showing such contempt, not just for the nation, its environment and its citizenry, but for reality itself – because that is the basis of how this country was formed. It has served countless politicians exceptionally well in the past.

Australia was founded on the lie that this country was terra nullius. It was founded on the lie that white men are the superior species. It was founded on the lie that the country was previously “unsettled” and that importing animals, plants, pests and unsustainable farming practices was how best to “settle” this “wild” land. It was founded on the lie that this is a “lucky country” and the land of a “fair go for all”.

Within my lifetime, I have seen the same lies play out to justify the Northern Territory intervention, to attack land rights, to justify inaction on climate change, to deny the stolen generations ever happened, to dehumanise and delegitimise the plights of Indigenous peoples, the unemployed, the entire “left”-leaning population.

These contradictory lies have necessitated a phenomenal amount of cognitive dissonance within the population in order for them to feel that patriotic pride that usually comes out so strongly in the form of flags, flag capes, flag thongs and alcoholism later this month. I assume a few beers make the whole thing all the more easier to swallow.

For the past few years, many people have attempted to wake people out of this blind and misplaced nationalism through the “change the date” campaign. This call is not a new one by any means, but social media gave it new life and new levels of media attention. I was a strong supporter of it when the hashtag first appeared on Twitter. For a time, when you searched “change the date” on Google it was an article I had written in 2016, simply titled, “Why we need to change the date of Australia Day”.

I was buoyed by how many non-Indigenous people seemed supportive of this campaign, but after a few years I noticed the foundation of it being chipped away. That is, too many people seemed to think the only problem with modern-day Australia, or its history, was the date on which we were holding our national celebration. Change the date was never simply about the date, it was merely a symptom, a symbol, a challenge to the nation to ask itself: “What kind of country would want to celebrate on this date?”

After feeling somewhat disillusioned with where the campaign had gone, I worked to shift the conversation away from #changethedate and instead move towards #changethenation. I hoped this would hit home the reality that the problems with this nation run much deeper than a day in the calendar.

I thought we had time to have these conversations, I didn’t expect #climatechangethenation to manifest itself in the form of unprecedented bushfires destroying the country.

But this is not a different conversation than the one that Indigenous people have been having in various forms since the earliest days of invasion and colonisation. Rather it is the inevitable consequence of refusing to have the conversation at a national level.

Instead we are told that now is not the time to have such conversations, not while the fires are burning. But it seems that if we do not have the conversation now then the windows for any conversation, “in between fires”, will become increasingly shorter.

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Australia is home to the oldest living cultures on Earth – cultures that understood the health of the land, the water, the animals and the people are one and the same. We cannot take Australia back to its pre-invasion state, but we can move forward into the future embracing these same principles, and returning Indigenous people to our rightful role as guardians and caretakers.

It is fitting that this should occur so close to Australia Day, and during the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook not actually circumnavigating the country.

It would have been better if we didn’t need such a dire catalyst for these conversations to occur, but here we are. The only question now is where do we go from here?

Do we recognise that changing a date will do no more good than changing a prime minister if we do not change the nation along with it?

Or do we continue along the path that has for so long brought devastation to Indigenous peoples, and is now bringing devastation to the rest of the nation as well?

Because if we don’t change the nation for the better then the nation, and the world, is gonna keep changing for the worse.