australia day

Happy Australia Day, the one day out of 365 (except in an Olympic year which is 15 days out of 366) where Western Australians act like they love being part of this Commonwealth we call Australia.

It struck me as I was driving around the South-West with my trusty companion and I spotted many, many dinky plastic Australian flags hysterically waving above windows of 4WDs and station wagons alike.

On the 26th of January, Perthites wet themselves with excitement at the prospect of seeing a big cracker night, waving their torches when the radio tells them to and getting into a bit of biffo once the anticlimactic 'big firework' has gone off.

It'll be an orgy of "We love Australia, isn't it the greatest?" while the rest of the country has a barbeque and perhaps a Hottest 100 party to celebrate yet another public holiday

Come the 27th of January, it'll be back to the same old attitude of everything being biased towards the 'Eastern States' (a curious phrase that only gets uttered with such venom this side of Kalgoorlie), empty threats of secession and a one-eyed fanaticism of any of our successful Western Australian sons or daughters.

We have a resident moody poet in Tim Winton, our resident revered sporting teams and our resident bad boy in Ben Cousins who decided to reside elsewhere. We love nothing more than to celebrate our own.

We lord our oppressive summers and isolation over other Australians like battle scars, as if it somehow makes us more manly.

In reality, it's just a bit pathetic. Like a pre-pubescent boy boasting that he ran harder, faster, longer to justify his existence in his little boy-clique.

The fact that we eagerly participate one day of the year only to snub the other 19 million people for the other 364 days is petty and shallow.

And if we really, truly loved everything about our big chunk of dry land, we'd be having that big cracker night on the first of June.