Patriotism is always stubbornly absent in me on days of official national commemoration.

Australia Day – Invasion Day – has always left me cold for its divisiveness, historical asymmetry and exclusivity. Anzac Day, an unofficial national day for many, has never raised a patriotic shiver in me.

I admit to feeling more than a little buoyant on particular international sporting occasions. Australia flogging England, here or there, in an Ashes Test series gives me an anticolonial glow. But not exactly a patriotic high.

But true stories of Australian multi-ethnicity that play out on sporting fields or in so many cultural spheres, stories that reinforce my faith in an Australia that would be altered irrevocably by those advocating monoculturalism (or who at best supinely equivocate about it) do make me feel patriotic.

Take the Socceroos and the football World Cup. They represented a modern nation that is built on an overwhelming rejection of the abhorrent white Australia policy.

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The blind racism and profound illogicality that underpins so much of One Nation’s so-called policies on economics, immigration and social cohesion were exposed by Pauline Hanson’s absurd proposition that the Socceroos........

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