Bill Stefaniak’s laughable white-washing of the complex relationship between Australia Day and Australia’s Indigenous people (CW, 20 Jan) is unworthy of your readers. His easy lauding Aboriginal heroes is a laughably inadequate response to the issue.

Australia can rightly celebrate many achievements – notably having become a pluralist, multi-cultural democracy. But surely no one could reasonably think that the historical injustices that Indigenous Australians suffered – and the consequences they continue to suffer – can justify Stefaniak’s ‘Oi, oi, oi!’ Please give us columnists who can face the complex and often uncomfortable realities of our past and present, not simplistic pap.

• Prof. P Stanley, Dickson ACT 2602

For more on this issue:

• A history of Australia’s national day
• Why all Australians should celebrate 26 January