Reflections on Harmony Day 2025
**Trigger Warning - this blog post touches on war, other conflicts and their aftermaths, trauma, racism and historical events. Some readers may find this confronting so discretion is advised.**
Every year, when we are approaching Harmony Day, I reflect upon the learnings that I had as a child, so I thought I might share them with you. I know this post will definitely show my age, but the well known saying tells us that with age comes wisdom, so hopefully, this will be true.
Almost every person who came to live in Australia in the 1970’s and 1980’s, unless they were from a country such as Britain, were required to live in a migrant centre for at least six months. These centres were government owned and funded. The adults received on site, intensive training in English and cultural norms of their new home, even down to simple things such as going shopping, standing in queues and using deodorant.
Very close to my primary school was one of these migrant centres, so the children from there would attend our school. Most of the children were from Vietnam, Cambodia, which was usually called Kampuchea by the children, and Laos. They had fled from the conflict of the Vietnam War and from the Khmer Rouge, often by boat after living in the horrifically violent migrant camps for years. Unlike their parents, the children were not given lessons in English prior to coming to our school, so as well as having to try understand and complete their schoolwork in a completely different language to what they were used to, they were also trying to cope with the trauma, and quite possibly PTSD, from all they had seen and experienced prior to getting on those rickety little boats to make the dangerous journey across the sea.
There were also children from Mediterranean countries, primarily Greece and Italy, and I can vividly remember the excitement when a girl came to us from behind the Iron Curtain, specifically Hungary. Whilst those children did not have the trauma background of the Asian children, just like them, they had to endure the racism which was so prevalent in the Australian community: It was extremely common to hear “wog,” “chink” and other derogatory terms being thrown at the children, and not just by children.
This must have been a massive challenge for our teachers: The mix of children and all their challenges, in combination with the class sizes of usually somewhere between 35 and 46 children squeezed into rooms with only 30 desks, particularly during the heat of summer, was far from ideal teaching conditions. They also had to deal with the results of the “Aussie kids” frequently coming from racist families and bringing those attitudes into the classroom and schoolyard.
When I was in about grade two, we had a new teacher who had come from South Africa, who had fled from apartheid. She may have been the catalyst, maybe even introducing the idea given it originated in her home country following the Sharpeville massacre, but from that year on, our school celebrated Harmony Day every year. We shared food and discovered that those stinky things the migrant centre children brought for lunch were actually very tasty and that many of our Aussie foods are based on foods from other countries. We dressed up and learned that many countries had traditional costumes, and how beautiful they frequently were. We had books read to us from their home countries, which had been translated into English, and learned that many countries had similar stories, just with different character names and settings. We had teachers come from the migrant centre and teach us Vietnamese, Italian and Greek, so we learned there was a wide variety of languages, and every one of those languages had both similar sounds to English and sounds which were very different. For a few of us, it also resulted in the children sharing often graphic stories of their previous lives, so we learned that people have different experiences, some of them extremely negative and some lovely, and that they almost invariably feel gratitude in being able to be in Australia, so for us to value our land, people and the way we live. The most important learnings we had were that our country is amazing, that differences are to be understood and celebrated, and that everyone is equal and deserves to live in peace and harmony.
Years later, Harmony Day became a commonly celebrated day across the country, carrying with it the hope that the learnings we were privileged to receive earlier could be shared across our great nation.
It is only as an adult, looking back, that I appreciate the strength and courage of our teachers in introducing this celebration to our school, running in direct conflict with the majority of families’ expectations and attitudes. Every time I interact with a person who has come from overseas and is learning English, I feel gratitude towards my teachers and admiration for the bravery of that “new Australian” for being able to leave so much of what was familiar to them behind and to adapt to new cultural expectations, and also for their ability to learn two, and frequently more, languages. For me, Harmony Day is a celebration of the wonders of differences and similarities, that everyone is equal and that everyone deserves happiness and opportunities.