Hope. On this Australia Day, that's what I'm thinking about: hope.

Odd, maybe — I am an Indigenous person — Kamilaroi, Wiradjuri, Dharrawall, to be more specific and respectful — you might expect me to talk about trauma, invasion, colonisation.

Certainly, those things cannot be ignored; those things that the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once called "the memory of wounds".

These wounds are real; for so many, the legacy of this country's history hangs like a dead weight.

Where is hope? When we are reminded almost daily of the tragedy of Aboriginal youth suicide; children as young as 10 years old who cannot face another day of life in our country.

Yet, without hope, where are we?

Hope is the oxygen in our blood; resentment is its poison.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the resentful man, caught in a time warp, returning always to the source of injustice that he cannot fix and does not want to fix.

History, for him, is a festering wound, to be picked at over and over, never allowing it to heal. His suffering is his strength; his weakness the greatest weapon he has over his oppressor:

"His soul squints; his mind loves hidden crannies, tortuous paths and backdoors […] he is past master in silence, in not forgetting …"

Indigenous boys waving Union Jacks greet Queen Elizabeth in Cooktown in 1970. ( Queensland State Archives )

When forgetting heals

Forgetting is a hard word. How do we forget? Is forgetting itself a betrayal?

We are told always to remember — to fail to remember, as Paul Ricouer put it, is to "bury the victims twice".

Those who do not remember the past, are bound to repeat it: isn't that what we are told?

But the world is torn apart by conflicts fuelled by too much memory that festers into toxic resentment.

The 19th century French historian, Ernest Renan, believed that history — memory — could be the enemy of reconciliation.

He set us a challenge that resonates on Australia Day: "Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation".

Can I forget?

Can I put aside the memory of wounds that have been passed down in story from one generation of my family to the next?

But forgetting need not mean surrender; it certainly does not mean amnesia.

Forgetting asks us to think about what we do with our memories, with our history.

Here is the big test of forgetting: can we balance the desire for justice and the need for peace?

Think about that: we can pursue justice, we can litigate the past in an endless series of Nuremberg trials, or we can choose a peace and put the bones of our ancestors to rest and know that their struggle and their suffering released us from their burden.

Australia Day brings up the question of reconciliation and race relations in Australia. ( Flickr: Michael Coghlan )

Justice or peace?

That was the choice facing South Africa at the end of apartheid: justice or peace.

They could pursue the crimes of the past and prosecute the perpetrators or they could let truth release them from history's hold.

In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, forgiveness and reconciliation were the "only truly viable alternatives to revenge, retribution and reprisal".

"Without forgiveness" — he said — "there is no future."

Archbishop Tutu headed a "truth and reconciliation commission" not a "truth and justice commission".

Justice perhaps would have been more fitting, and it would have electrified the blood of a people with every reason for vengeance.

By choosing peace, Tutu set South African people a more godly task:

"Forgiveness is not facile or cheap. It is a costly business that makes those who are willing to forgive even more extraordinary".

Tutu, Mandela; they forged from forgiveness the greater justice of a nation for all.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (R) and former South African President Thabo Mbeki. ( Reuters: Odd Andersen )

But are there crimes so monstrous they must never be forgotten or forgiven?

The Austrian philosopher, Jean Amery, refused to let go of the horrors of the Holocaust.

He was sent to Auschwitz in 1943; 417 of those he arrived with were immediately killed.

He railed against what he called "the hollow, thoughtless, utterly false conciliatoriness or the pathos of forgiveness and reconciliation".

His anger was as righteous as Desmond Tutu's love.

His words are chilling:

"What happened, happened. But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted. I rebel against my past, against history, and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history".

Jean Amery clung to his resentment, "to be a victim alone is not an honour", he said.

This man who survived the death camp, who wrote to tell the world of the horror of what he had seen, who remembered the names and faces of those who had died, eventually took his own life at the age of 66 in a hotel room in Salzburg.

Identity politics can divide us

Our identities can become inextricably linked to suffering until it destroys us.

As the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, said "we are condemned to history".

For so long I believed that to be true. I believed that history was to identity what carbon is to steel.

But today I have no need of this word "identity"; not one that pits us against each other.

Exclusive identity can too easily lock us into positions of permanence and opposition — racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender — that don't speak to the reality of our complex and interwoven lives.

Instead of "identity", I wonder if we are not better served by identities, that open up to the world not shrink from it; that bring us into the sunshine of shared humanity and out of the darkness of our own misery.

Yet on each Australia Day, I am confronted by identity: what is it to be Australian? What is it to be Indigenous?

It is as if there are two sides to me that must forever be in conflict, when the truth is I am black and I am white; I am the synthesis of all of our history.

If I have a place it is in the brackish waters between the river of my Aboriginal ancestors and the sea that brought my Irish forebears in chains.

Australia Day divides the country. ( AAP: Joe Castro )

We are a nation unfinished

Australia Day for me holds all our contradictions.

Moving the date would be nothing more than a political gesture, if we don't answer the much harder question: who are we? We: all of us.

Ernest Renan said a nation is a "daily referendum".

And a nation is built on what it forgets as much as what it remembers. What are we prepared to put aside?

It is a question for both those who cling to the myth of Australia's unquestionable glory, and those who believe our history is an unending litany of horror.

We are a nation unfinished; a nation that struggles still with its unfinished business: the injustice of our nation's birth.

That's my Australia. And on this Australia Day, I can give thanks and I can remember and I can try to forget — to put aside resentment — while never losing sight of the sad truth that those who suffer the most still in our country, are those whose lives are tied to that first injustice.

And I can hope.

Is there a path from resentment to hope?

Radical Hope was the title of a book by philosopher Jonathan Lear, which told the story of the Native American leader, Alaxchiiaahush.

He is remembered today as Chief Plenty Coups — a name won in battle, each victory counted as a coup.

Later in life, he told his biographer of the arrival of white people. In his words, the mighty Crow people's hearts "had fallen to the ground and they could not lift them again".

In a dream, the chickadee told Plenty Coups that he would lead the Crow to a new life, recovering their dignity from devastation.

That is what Jonathan Lear asks us: can we live an ethical life when all we have known is lost?

It is a question I especially ask today. Is there a pathway from resentment to hope?

War bonnet and coup sticks given to the World War I Unknown by Plenty Coups, Chief of the Crow Nation. ( Flickr: Tim Evanson )

As an old man, Chief Plenty Coup was invited to Washington DC to mark the burial of the unknown soldier. He represented those Native Americans who had served in World War One.

The warrior laid his feathered war bonnet and his coup stick down with the sarcophagus.

In burying them, Plenty Coups was marking the passing of a way of life; the end of a tradition and a beginning.

Surrender? Some accused him of that. Other Native American leaders taunted him; mocked him.

But Chief Plenty Coups was setting his people a greater task: to believe in a new hope.

The old ways of war may have ended but there were new battlegrounds to call young warriors.

"Education is your most powerful weapon", he told his people. With education he said they would be "the white man's equal", without it "you are his victim".

The Crow would fight with their minds, they would be strong, their culture would endure and they would find a place in a new America.

We can't look away from our most vulnerable

Indigenous Australia has had its own warriors: those who have made this a better country, have written new stories, changed our laws.

They had hope.

Hope — radical hope — is what builds a nation, it asks what happens after protest and anger.

Too many Indigenous people languish in our prisons. Too many Indigenous lives are cut short. On this day, we must ask: for them, where is the Australian dream?

Today, while we celebrate all that is good, we must remind ourselves that we fail the most vulnerable.

We have unfinished business in Australia and today is not a day to look away.

This past Christmas I was reminded of my grandfather, a Wiradjuri man, a warrior — Bumuldhaany in his language — who signed up to fight in World War Two against the wishes of my grandmother who furiously asked her husband what this country had ever done for him.

Why would he fight? Because he said, this was his country too, and it would be the country of his children.

A 1908 portrait of Plenty Coups by Edward Curtis. ( Library of Congress: Edward S. Curtis )

I think of him today and all those like him.

I look at his photograph and I look at the photograph of Chief Plenty Coups.

In Plenty Coup's face is the determination that his people would have a future, and not a future bound to resentment.

His braided hair falls past his shoulders, his eyes are dark and penetrating, his ears are pierced and adorned with rings.

He is proud and defiant, the face of an old warrior who knew battles and knew what it took to live beyond the battleground.

It is a face that speaks to me of what it is to live with dignity when all otherwise would be lost.

It is the face of radical hope.

Stan Grant is ABC Indigenous Affairs Analyst.