By Sharon Were.
Over the weekend (31 August 2025), the “March 4 Australia” took place. On the surface it was presented as a call for accountability, yet what echoed through the streets were chants of “send them home” and cries of “Australian pride.” The noise was sharp, drawing a line between who is welcomed as “us” and who is pushed aside as “them,” and for me those words were more than a slogan. They pressed against years of lived experience, reawakening the strain that so many of us carry every day in this country.
For twenty-six years I have lived with racism here. It has been a constant backdrop, steady and unrelenting, and while this march did not create that weight, it certainly amplified it. It reminded me of how fragile belonging can be made to feel when it is conditional, sending the same message again and again: belonging will only be granted if we erase parts of ourselves, stay silent about history, assimilate into narrow expectations, and accept permission from those who hold power.
The question of who counts as Australian is never asked in a vacuum, and this march gave its answer. “Us” is whiteness, the descendants of a colonial past, and “them” is anyone who carries multicultural lived experience. The effect is blunt, sidelining more than half of this country and erasing the fact that history, migration, and contribution can simply be ignored.
And it is not confined to marches. Scrolling through the comments about the event, I read someone say, “my Asian neighbours are lovely.” They likely thought they were being generous, but what it really revealed was a hierarchy where acceptance is framed as something to be granted by whiteness, not an experience owned by those who live it. The speaker could not see the weight of those words, but the neighbour being “praised” would have felt it deeply. This is where the exhaustion sets in, because conditional belonging creates a constant strain. It is a stress that lives in the body and mind, never switching off because identity cannot be switched off. Events like this march ignite acculturation stress by sharpening the sense that the structures of privilege and exclusion remain intact.
Colonisation has never been dismantled, it adapts, and its most enduring weapon is silence. Those who inherit the structures of colonisation carry the privilege of looking away. That privilege allows history to be dismissed, the suffering of others to be minimised, and the full weight of responsibility to be avoided. It blocks the ability to sit in the truth of multicultural Australia, because it treats belonging as conditional and empathy as optional. It forces us to confront a deeper question: who is multicultural? If First Nations people are the first people of this land, then regardless of wherever their ancestors migrated from, they were the first humans to live here, and every person who has come after, whether migrant, refugee, or settler, forms part of a multicultural nation. Whiteness is part of this reality, and it must reckon with that truth rather than deny it.
From where I stand as the lead and facilitator of the Multicultural Lived Experience Framework, this march was not only a gathering of voices, it was an assault on the very recognition of multicultural lived experience, an attempt to strip it of legitimacy and cast it aside as though it does not matter. To deny that experience is to deny the lives, histories, and contributions of millions of people who carry migration, settlement, and acculturation in their bones. This is why racism and discrimination cut so deeply, because they are never side issues. They directly shape the health and wellbeing of multicultural people, corroding belonging and placing heavy strain on everyday life.
And yet, even within that weight, they reveal something else. Those who live through migration, settlement, and acculturation continue to show resilience that cannot be diminished. We have endured systems harsher than the ones we face here, and still we build new lives. We have carried the uncertainty of displacement, the demands of starting over, and the isolation that comes from being marginalised, and still we create, contribute, and belong. That endurance is not a concession to exclusion; it is a testament to our strength.
The march did not simply shout exclusion, it attempted to brand it into the streets, to mark out who is wanted and who is not. Yet in doing so it revealed something it could never erase, the resilience of those who live through migration, settlement, and acculturation. We continue to create lives here, we continue to belong here, and we continue to rise in the face of those who would prefer silence. Still, we rise (Maya Angelou).
For those outside the multicultural lived experience, this should not only be a moment of observation but a moment of reflection and responsibility. Ask whose voice you hear when history is silenced. Ask what assumptions you carry when you decide who belongs. Belonging should never depend on erasure or approval, it should be a given, grounded in the lives of those who are already here. Neutrality in the face of exclusion is never neutral; it is a decision to let inequity stand. For some, neutrality has long been the way to escape having to engage, a position of comfort that privilege makes possible. But comfort does not erase responsibility. With privilege comes the obligation to stand, to act, and to use that position to dismantle the silence that others are forced to live within. The march has passed, but the work of dismantling silence and building equity is still ahead of us. It belongs to all of us.