Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Travel around Australia and you’ll find someone trying to bugger everything up—specifically when it comes to social cohesion. Take Appin Public School on the south-west fringe of Sydney. The clue is right there on Appin’s Wikipedia page: “Appin is a town… in Tharawal country near its boundary with Gandangara country. Appin is in the lands of the Dharawal people.” The editors write this with such clinical certainty, you’d think these were official civic boundaries rather than recent ideological additions.
Obviously, those are traditional Aboriginal names that many of us don’t know, but modern “woke” Australians are intent on replacing established names with them in the name of so-called decolonisation. It doesn’t help anyone; it’s mostly confusing—but more to the point, it’s deliberately divisive.
Yet, here we are at a small primary school that has decided to dip its toe into this world of renaming. As reported recently: “Parents rage as school confirms renaming. Appin Primary school has decided to go ahead and rename longstanding sport houses with the names of great Indigenous figures, despite major backlash from the school community.”
As we’ve seen, the push for “inclusion” rarely involves actually listening to the community it claims to represent. It’s about control, and the rigid categorisation of society along racial lines.
The school’s existing sports houses had been named after local historical figures: former NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Australian explorers William Hovell and Hamilton Hume, and the pastoralist James Tyson. For decades, these names represented the literal pioneers who settled and built the region.
Unfortunately for this lot, every single one of them is being replaced with an Indigenous Australian: former sprinter Cathy Freeman, land rights activist Eddie Mabo, former AFL player Adam Goodes, and singer Jessica Mauboy. I’m not sure what a pop singer has to do with the tradition of honouring the foundational figures of modern Australia, but let’s not let relevance get in the way of a good story. Let’s instead choose a grab-bag of famous people whose only common link is their race.
This highlights one important point: They tell you that you’re racist if you don’t support the new names, yet the entire selection process is based purely on race. It ignores everyone else—of any background—who has contributed to the region’s history. If you’re going to change the house names in a democratic society, at the very least, you should provide a shortlist of local candidates with their biographies and actually let democracy take its course. But no; they’ve essentially imposed this on the school body.
Not to mention that the whole idea of sporting houses only exists because of the British Empire. The entire concept is born out of colonialism. If the school really wants to “decolonise,” they should scrap the house system entirely.
If the names of the houses are colonial artefacts that must be removed, then the structure of the houses itself is equally an artefact of that same system. Perhaps they should even knock down the school buildings while they’re at it, because, you know, the entire concept of a Western education system is a British colonial import too.
None of this is too surprising coming from the school, I suppose. On their Facebook page, they regularly celebrate events like NAIDOC Week—because apparently, a single day isn’t nearly enough to celebrate the culture and achievements of one specific group.
On the school’s website, you can find out who’s responsible for this corporate activism and social engineering masquerading as education. This is the principal, Cheny Collins, who presumably presides over this new era of state-sanctioned racial division.
In the Week 2 newsletter, the school spelt out why they’re erasing these guys from the history books due to “massive fortunes being stolen on First Nations land,” “doing some terrible things to women,” and having “aggressive personas.”
Although, the new sports house is named after Adam Goodes—a man who, after scoring a goal, would mime throwing an Aboriginal hunting weapon at his opponents. But no, that’s not aggressive; that’s just “celebrating culture.”
By Week 10, they realised that a large proportion of the school community didn’t like the idea of changing the house names, but they went ahead and did it anyway.
Obviously, the principal and the Education department always wanted these Indigenous names, and that’s all there was to it. Be damned with what the students thought, be damned with what the parents thought; this entire process was just a way to engineer a thin veneer of democracy to retroactively justify a decision that was made months ago.
This incessant and relentless push to rename just about everything is only creating further division in our country and forcing the next generation to view the world through a lens of historical resentment rather than shared potential.
MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn
Travel around Australia and you’ll find someone trying to bugger everything up—specifically when it comes to social cohesion. Take Appin Public School on the south-west fringe of Sydney. The clue is right there on Appin’s Wikipedia page: “Appin is a town… in Tharawal country near its boundary with Gandangara country. Appin is in the lands of the Dharawal people.” The editors write this with such clinical certainty, you’d think these were official civic boundaries rather than recent ideological additions.
Obviously, those are traditional Aboriginal names that many of us don’t know, but modern “woke” Australians are intent on replacing established names with them in the name of so-called decolonisation. It doesn’t help anyone; it’s mostly confusing—but more to the point, it’s deliberately divisive.
Yet, here we are at a small primary school that has decided to dip its toe into this world of renaming. As reported recently: “Parents rage as school confirms renaming. Appin Primary school has decided to go ahead and rename longstanding sport houses with the names of great Indigenous figures, despite major backlash from the school community.”
As we’ve seen, the push for “inclusion” rarely involves actually listening to the community it claims to represent. It’s about control, and the rigid categorisation of society along racial lines.
The school’s existing sports houses had been named after local historical figures: former NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Australian explorers William Hovell and Hamilton Hume, and the pastoralist James Tyson. For decades, these names represented the literal pioneers who settled and built the region.
Unfortunately for this lot, every single one of them is being replaced with an Indigenous Australian: former sprinter Cathy Freeman, land rights activist Eddie Mabo, former AFL player Adam Goodes, and singer Jessica Mauboy. I’m not sure what a pop singer has to do with the tradition of honouring the foundational figures of modern Australia, but let’s not let relevance get in the way of a good story. Let’s instead choose a grab-bag of famous people whose only common link is their race.
This highlights one important point: They tell you that you’re racist if you don’t support the new names, yet the entire selection process is based purely on race. It ignores everyone else—of any background—who has contributed to the region’s history. If you’re going to change the house names in a democratic society, at the very least, you should provide a shortlist of local candidates with their biographies and actually let democracy take its course. But no; they’ve essentially imposed this on the school body.
Not to mention that the whole idea of sporting houses only exists because of the British Empire. The entire concept is born out of colonialism. If the school really wants to “decolonise,” they should scrap the house system entirely.
If the names of the houses are colonial artefacts that must be removed, then the structure of the houses itself is equally an artefact of that same system. Perhaps they should even knock down the school buildings while they’re at it, because, you know, the entire concept of a Western education system is a British colonial import too.
None of this is too surprising coming from the school, I suppose. On their Facebook page, they regularly celebrate events like NAIDOC Week—because apparently, a single day isn’t nearly enough to celebrate the culture and achievements of one specific group.
On the school’s website, you can find out who’s responsible for this corporate activism and social engineering masquerading as education. This is the principal, Cheny Collins, who presumably presides over this new era of state-sanctioned racial division.
In the Week 2 newsletter, the school spelt out why they’re erasing these guys from the history books due to “massive fortunes being stolen on First Nations land,” “doing some terrible things to women,” and having “aggressive personas.”
Although, the new sports house is named after Adam Goodes—a man who, after scoring a goal, would mime throwing an Aboriginal hunting weapon at his opponents. But no, that’s not aggressive; that’s just “celebrating culture.”
By Week 10, they realised that a large proportion of the school community didn’t like the idea of changing the house names, but they went ahead and did it anyway.
Obviously, the principal and the Education department always wanted these Indigenous names, and that’s all there was to it. Be damned with what the students thought, be damned with what the parents thought; this entire process was just a way to engineer a thin veneer of democracy to retroactively justify a decision that was made months ago.
This incessant and relentless push to rename just about everything is only creating further division in our country and forcing the next generation to view the world through a lens of historical resentment rather than shared potential.
MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn
