"Slaughtered" and "invaded" are incredibly jarring words when delivered in a soft tone.



This is what Mirrabee Al-Abr, a 13-year-old Aboriginal boy from New South Wales, is feeling and thinking while the rest of the nation is celebrating the creation of the first British colony on the Australian continent.

Mirrabee says it without malice or anger – the words just float from his mouth. His young mind drifts to his ancestors and the pain they must have felt during the early years of the colony.



Sipping on a can of Coca-Cola in BuzzFeed's Sydney office, the teenager scans the room. He's polite and intelligent, and looks much younger than his age. Yuin and Wiradjuri blood runs through Mirrabee's veins and it's an ancestry that he's fiercely proud of.

We're chatting to Mirrabee just a few minutes' walk from the shore of Port Jackson in Sydney, where Captain Arthur Phillip landed on 26 January 1788 to claim New South Wales for the British Empire.

“[I get really] angry and annoyed," he says. "It’s really annoying because they’re celebrating the day of your people being slaughtered and the day that caused all that destruction and all that suffering to a very peaceful people."







