We three kings of Orient are

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One in a taxi - one in a car -

One on a scooter tooting his hooter

Following yonder star.

- Schoolkids' traditional, harmlessly blasphemous adaptation of the famous carol

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The Silky Oaks of the National Arboretum may not know or care that it's Christmas (although who are we to assume that trees have no religiosity?) but they are coming into fabulous flower right now, just as they always do as Christmas looms.

The Arboretum's whole flowering forest of them (the Silky Oak is the proudly Australian species Grevillea robusta) is spectacular in the extreme at the moment. The pageantry of it! It wouldn't surprise if the flowers' golden-orange radiant glow is visible even to astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Even the single representative of the grand species in my front garden is, as I write, making a lustrously golden-orange difference in my otherwise lacklustre street. It has, as was often said of Gough Whitlam, a certain grandeur.

Almost the only memorable thing our prime minister said this year was his call for an Australian "progressive patriotism".

My ears pricked up at this because I have come to realise that my passionate love of my country is in part a kind of fauna and flora patriotism.

Australian politics, government and culture are often imitative of what other nations do but our flora and creatures are unique. And when they give us delight it is a peculiarly Australian delight that is given. It is a delight that makes our bosoms swell not so much with pride as with ... as with ... as with something the English language has no apt word to capture, a kind of rapturous gratitude.

Those of us who prefer this kind of soft patriotism find the jingoistic, hard, 'valour'-mongering........

© Canberra Times