Thousands of people gathered across the country to take part in Invasion Day rallies on Thursday, with protesters declaring "Australia Day is dead".
This year, debate also raged about the proposed Voice to Parliament, an idea which is dividing Indigenous leaders.
In Sydney, after more than a dozen speeches from First Nations elders and community leaders, the huge crowd took to the streets with passing cars beeping their horns in support.
The peaceful march, which began with the sound of Tracy Chapman's Talkin' Bout a Revolution bellowing from large speakers, made its way to inner-city Belmore Park.
The crowds gathered at Yabun Festival, a one-day event in celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.
As the so-called change-the-date debate continued around the country, Dunghutti rights activist Paul Silva said moving the day was not going to resolve the problem.
"We need to abolish Australia Day all together, it should never be celebrated," he said.
"If someone invaded your home, murdered your family, and stole your land, I can 100 per cent guarantee that family would not be celebrating that day."
In 2023, the movement against the date of Australia Day has a new context: plans for a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to be enshrined in the constitution.
In Melbourne, Gumbainggir man Uncle Gary Foley gave a stirring speech telling the crowd the Voice would "only be cosmetic".
"Like lipstick on a pig. It will not address the deep underlying issues that still pervade Australian society and that primary issue is white Australian racism," he said.
Federal Greens senator Lidia Thorpe also criticised the Voice, saying everyone should be brought together through a "sovereign treaty" instead.
"This is a war, a war that was declared on our people over 200 years ago," she said.
"What do we have to celebrate in this country? Do we want to become advisers now? Do we want to become an advisory body to the colonial system? We deserve better than that."
Jill Gallagher, Gunditjmara woman and Victoria's former treaty advancement commissioner, said other Indigenous figures' opposition to the Voice was "nonsensical".
"How can you get treaty without an elected voice?" she said.
"The government's not going to talk to every single Aboriginal person on this continent about what their treaty's going to look like.
"They have to have a mechanism to actually progress treaties."
Birri Gubba and Gangulu woman Teila Watson, an artist known as Ancestress, has been speaking and singing about the brutality of colonialism for years.
She hopes Australians consider a redistribution of colonial wealth, and how they can contribute to a better future.
"White Australia has a Black future if it has any at all," she said.
"The system of colonial democracy has shown us in a little over 230 years it is socially unsustainable. And ... it is ecologically unsustainable.
"Unlike our systems of governance which thrived here for over 60,000 years."
For Wandandian woman Mandy Braddick, of the Gumea language group, having a treaty is more important than a Voice to parliament.
Growing up, January 26 signified a date of segregation for Ms Braddick from other Australians.
"I never felt a part of that day."
About 1,000 people marched along King William Street on Kaurna land in Adelaide, chanting "always was always will be Aboriginal land", in one of the biggest Australia Day protests the city has seen.
In Ballarat, Victoria, Mer woman Deb Lowah-Clark told the city's dawn service the term "Survival Day" was chosen by local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as a way of focusing on their experiences.
"Survival Day is a phrase to represent the fact that despite everything, despite massacres and systemic racism, people are standing to fight to hold onto their culture, their language, their traditions," she said.
Up in Mildura, Wanggumara woman Sharon Johnson told the crowd land grabbing was traumatic for Indigenous communities in the irrigation country and continued to present challenges today.
She said, for her, January 26 was a day of mourning the moment colonials "planted the flag in the ground and claimed Australia as a British colony".
At a dawn gathering in Port Macquarie, on the NSW Mid North Coast, a candle was lit to acknowledge and pay respect to First Nations people.
Birpai elder Rhonda Radley said the day was about the people who had "created the footprints for us to walk in and the struggles that have happened along the way".
Wiradjuri elder Enid Ingram attended the rally in Griffith, southern NSW, on Wiradjuri Country.
"We've still got our culture but we lost our language, we were forbidden to speak our language but it's been awoken now, it's being taught in schools," she said.
Devonport, in northern Tasmania, held its first-ever Invasion Day street march.
Hundreds of people turned out to share calls for the date of Australia Day to be changed, including Uncle Jimmy Everett who addressed the rally.
"Do we want a better Tasmania ... do we want a safe Tasmania ... do we want people in Tasmania to get on the job of being Tasmanians ... then change the date!"
In Mackay, Queensland, Darumbal Juru woman Bianca Dorante said participating in the rally honoured the family ties and cultural practices she felt had disappeared after colonisation.
"It's as a way of remembering all my ancestors who have survived the loss of languages, the loss of families, the loss of family traditions."
