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For a very brief moment about 7 years ago I considered getting a Southern Cross tattoo. I was living abroad at the time and caught up in a bout of home sickness and rugby world cup fueled national pride. But looking back I’m glad I didn’t as such a permanently patriotic form of branding has somehow evolved into something quite sinister.

And this isn’t isolated to constellation-inspired ink. In just a few short years the very idea of Australian patriotism has become associated with images of shirtless, beer swilling bogans wearing our national flag like a cape. Suddenly proclaiming your love for this country, or even identifying yourself as an “Aussie”, pigeonholes you as a racist. The fine line between nationalism and patriotism has been blurred and the very meaning of what it is to be Australian has been called into question.

There’s plenty of analysis out there already about the damaging effect this uniquely Caucasian brand of patriotism is having on our national identity and I don’t feel it needs to be repeated here. But there is an important point I want to get out there:
It’s still ok to be a patriot.

There is so much that makes me proud about this country. There is so much I identify with. I reject the idea that we need to decide what a “typical Australian” is as this just leads to alienation and stereotyping. As a nation we’re but a hundred years old and as a European settlement, not that much older. Hell, Scotland and England have been one kingdom for 400 years and they still don’t have a single national identity. But I do believe there is an Australian spirit that permeates our art, our music, our literature, our very culture, which is tangible and uniquely Australian.

The modern Australian spirit is tied to the promise of coming to a new country for new opportunities, the romance of the bush and the chance that each of us feels we have to make a difference.  Our passion for travel, our quest for knowledge, our sustained belief that if we put our mind to it anything can be achieved is all tied into what makes us Australian. Ours is (hopefully) a society where the lowliest of people can rise up, tame the brumby and become a legend.

This is what I’ve never understood about the nationalist political parties or rioting, boozed up youths in our beach suburbs – if you look back far enough almost everyone is from somewhere else. Almost everyone came to Australia for the same reasons. This idea that you can make a better life in a sunburnt country at the bottom of the world gives us all a shared history and is intrinsically bound to the Australian spirit. I feel proud that we are the kind of country that people want to come to to start a new life. We’re far too young to start preaching about exclusion or ownership or even a static cultural identity.

Australia is a lot of things. It’s the frontier captured by the words of Lawson and Patterson. It’s the larrikinism that underpins our society. It’s our willingness to give people a “fair go” but cut them down should they expect too much for too little. It’s where you can come to to get a fresh start, where your neighbour is here for the same reason as you. It’s the idea that we’d rather drown in a billabong than give up our freedom, that we’ll fight for our liberty and the liberty of others.

I know this all sounds like sentimental idealism and I’m not blind to the problems we face as a society. At the very least we owe so much to our indigenous forbearers for our past crimes that I wonder if that’s a debt we’ll ever pay off. And there are and will probably always be an undesirable element in our culture but I refuse to accept that this is part of the mainstream.

I’m not sure we need a day in January to reflect on our identity (although I do like the time off work) and I don’t want us to become like our flag-waving, president-saluting, healthcare-hating American cousins. But with so much media attention focused on the negative aspects of national pride at the moment it’s really easy to forget why we’re here in the first place. And that’s because, despite her flaws, we love this country and we wouldn’t live anywhere else.

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