When Mariam Veiszadeh took the wrong, slower bus route to work one morning in February, she innocently tweeted how she turned her bad start to the day into a positive: time to gaze out of the bus window and reflect.

A tweet in return took her back: "Yes, dreaming that one day all of this will belong to Islam I would imagine. You will fail!"

Veiszadeh, the Daily Life 2016 Woman of the Year, says it summed up what being Muslim in Australia has come to mean today.

"I could not tweet about a journey to work without someone turning it around … To have this collective blame applied to 300,000-plus Australian Muslims on a regular basis is really exhausting," the 32-year-old Sydneysider says of the Islamophobia that has swept so forcefully into political narratives in 2016.