National Identity Crisis Day

Just a quick one as I sit here, back at work, holding my head in my hands after an extra-long weekend. We were down in Tasmania with David and Sandy for a few days, and I got to catch a fish and eat it. So did Lesly! Santi got to do all kinds of things he'd never done before: pick strawberries, hold a worm, climb a woodpile, dig for potatoes, see a bettong ... Very cool.


And we celebrated Australia Day in fine style. We had an old-school wood barbeque (pictured) and David even made a pot of billy tea. While we chomped on our sausage sandwiches we also chatted about what exactly the day means now. The ads on the buses this year said something about a pledge of loyalty and wearing face paints. Besides being pretty naff it highlighted the fact that we are struggling to define what it means to be Australian.

And of course it is hard to define a culture; while things like food, music, dance, clothes are important, they don't get to the heart of it. The best idea we came up with was fairness, as in 'a fair go', 'fair dinkum' and 'fair suck of the sav'. Maybe it's not as relevant these days, but it certainly beats excessive use of face paints.