Who are we? It’s the hardy perennial, but insufficiently parsed, question looming over this polarising day that ever more contentiously continues to mark the supposed birth of Australian nationhood. It demands a soul search.

But this day of empirical triumphalism, bunting and tall ships – and conversely, trauma and historical nearsightedness – is renowned for neither national self-awareness nor self-reflection.

We will get to unreconciled colonial/frontier history shortly. But to begin with, it helps to accept a few other disquieting and fundamental truths.

The modern Australian state began as a colonial outpost built on a genocidal landgrab. It remains at once weirdly lackadaisical and resentful (in a kind of sun-kissed “if it ain’t broke …” defensive way) about proposed constitutional change to usher in either a republic or, first things first, perhaps, to acknowledge 60,000-plus years of Indigenous civilisation in the founding document of the settler state.

We cling, limpet-like, to the archaic vestiges of a distant dysfunctional hereditary monarchy – emotionally and psychologically lashed to that small island in Europe. Today is a lot about that. But we are also geopolitically and militarily hocked to Washington no matter what would-be dictator runs the place.

Thanks to an undying sentimental reverence for an outdated US-Australia alliance (largely unquestioned and unqualified, it seems, since the US rode to our rescue some 80 years ago), we have been drawn into endless imperial wars. Consequently, we have effectively ceded Australian territory to the Pentagon to use as a

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