ROANNA GONSALVES writes in Southern Crossings, a new blog run by a writers’ collective based in Australia, which aims “to reimagine Australia, South Asia, and the world, through South Asian bodies and minds.”

One rainy Mumbai day, sitting in an Udipi restaurant, chai cup in hand, I told a dear friend I would soon leave for Australia.

“I’ll never leave India and be a second class citizen in another country”, my friend said. My chai turned colder and a crinkly skin formed on its surface.

Seventeen years later, I realise that in perceiving a hierarchy of citizens in Australia, my friend was right, but in a manner that he did not intend…

…[T]here were certain fundamental truths that I did not grasp before I got here: Indigenous people i.e. Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, are the First Peoples of this land and the waters that surround it; they formed the First Nations of this continent; this always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

We are not the perpetrators, the ones who wielded the guns in the forgotten wars between invading white settlers and Indigenous Peoples. We are not the victims. However, as mainly economic migrants from South Asia (I acknowledge the many South Asian refugees from the conflict zones of Afghanistan and Sri Lanka), we are not absolved of complicity.

We are beneficiaries of the genocide of Aboriginal people, the dispossession of their land, the loss of their homes, their families, their cultural values, their tongues, their songs. It is such soil that we step on when we first step into Australia, soaked not just with the promise of a ‘first world lifestyle’, but squelchy with the memory of massacre.

Read the rest of this uncompromising and challenging set of reflections here.