A few days ago on this website, editor David Penberthy wrote to explain why, as he put it, “Australia Day is rubbish”. Well, not to come across all Sam Kekovich, but I reckon he’s full of it.
According to Penberthy, this annual celebration - which nicely bookends a silly season that begins with the running of the Melbourne Cup - is a shallow glorification of all that’s wrong with this country, “a half-witted contest to see how much meat you can eat and how much grog you can sink.”
As if there’s anything wrong with that.
The fact is that no free country spends its national day navel gazing. Instead, they hook on to some element of their individual creation story and use it as an excuse for a piss-up.
And as an American-born Australian who took citizenship three years ago, I’d like to say, hands off Australia Day.
In the weeks before the Fourth of July, you will not find Americans hunkered down over laptops, endlessly commenting on the websites of broadsheet newspapers, picking over the lowlights of their history from slavery to Vietnam.
Instead, the papers will be filled with tips on how to prepare the perfect potato salad (hint: think sour cream. And lots of dill.)
When the day finally comes it is spent much like an Australia Day, with friends, family, food and fireworks - and plenty of cold beer.
Likewise the French are happy to spend Bastille Day waving the tricolour while smoking unfiltered Gauloises and languidly speculating on their existential ennui. (OK, I made the last bit up because I have never enjoyed a Bastille Day in France.)
But it is a damn sure bet that however they celebrate, they don’t use the day to focus on the Jacobin terror into which their revolution quickly descended, or bemoan their forebears uniquely brutal colonial history around the world. Which is why there is nothing wrong with Australians enjoying Australia Day as they do.
Not because our past is perfect - it is not. But rather because it is imperfect, we need a break from the running battle between the shock troops of bogan jingoism with their southern cross tattoos on the one hand and the black-armband intellectuals who could give Jewish mothers a lesson or two in guilt on the other.
This is not to ignore the fact that people sometimes get out of hand on Australia Day. Last year 92 people in NSW were arrested; that leaves nearly seven million who were not.
Certainly a fair few more woke with sore heads the next morning.
But while the Nanny Roxons of the world might be able to cite increased health costs and hits to productivity, no study can put a dollar value on the relationships cemented, stories told, and memories formed on one of the few days on the calendar when we can all get together with no obligation other than to have fun.
And just as a few Croatian yobs in Melbourne do not prove that the entire sport of tennis is a hotbed violence and intolerance, neither should a few idiots turning the flag into a vehicle for abuse and intimidation blacken Australia’s reputation as one of the most tolerant and progressive societies in the world.
The fact is, we have the sort of robust civil society people in other parts of the world would - and all too often do - die for.
Which is the problem with calling Australia Day rubbish: it is a surrender. A surrender to those who confuse nationalism with patriotism, and a surrender to those on the other side for whom Australian history and culture is all dark underbelly.
We have 364 other days every year to work through these issues, and as a relatively young nation, it is no wonder that we are still finding a happy medium. This debate is crucial, and I look forward to a day when every day in Australia, not just Australia Day, is suffused by the quiet hum of understanding of what Bob Carr called “the brutality, the heroism, the tenderness, the patience, the humility as well as the pride” that has made our nation what it is today in all its imperfect greatness.
Until then, come 26 January, make mine a Cooper’s, thanks.
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