OPINION
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So, it's Australia Day on Monday. Hmmmm. After 46 years I still don't know how to feel about this slot on the national calendar. If it's a call to display national pride, I'm not sure why we bother. I was born here; certainly not something I'm proud of, because I had no choice nor played any meaningful role in the matter. Being proud to be Australian seems about as rational to me as being proud to have brown hair. It just happened. Same goes for migrants: I can't ever imagine myself being proud to move to Sweden or New Zealand, as pleasant as they may seem.
Fortunate to be Australian? Yes. Proud? No.
But if others want to be proud, wave the flag, listen to John Farnham's Greatest Hits, paint their faces green and gold, eat lamb, worship Sam Kekovich, and shout Oi! Oi! Oi! while they do bombs in the pool, I say, "Have a blast! Rejoice! Knock yourselves out!" I just won't be joining in. It's not that I'm anti-Australia Day, I'm just a bit bemused by it.
I mentioned this to a mate a few years back and he said I was un-Australian. I asked him what he meant by "un-Australian" and he struggled to give a cogent answer. I've thought about the term a lot since John Howard took office in '96. "Un-Australian" got a good flogging in the years after Honest John took a big step to the right to soak up all those votes that looked like they might migrate to One Nation.
I've heard "un-Australian" used clumsily and stupidly in politics and pubs to denigrate, divide and attack people and ideas. But the very first time I heard the term remains, for me, the most perfect example of its proper meaning; it made immediate sense and has served as a compass to this very day for how I treat my neighbours. It was first spoken to me by my dad around 1982 while I was mowing the lawn.
Like a lot of Aussies in the 'burbs, we shared with our neighbours a common stretch of council-owned grass - the nature strip - between our respective driveways. Our nature strip was big and a right pain in the arse to mow.
So there I was, 14 or so, doing my chores. I mowed the backyard, then the front yard and then I had to pull the hefty machine up our steep driveway to mow the nature strip. It was one of those wet, hot, humid summers that made the grass grow like a bastard and I'd already emptied about 10 catchers full of ankle high grass clippings. I was buggered and over it. I mowed the nature strip ... but only up to the invisible line that marked the division of our place and the neighbours' property. Our side of the street frontage was Victa neat while theirs looked comparatively crapful.
"All done champ?" my dad asked as I staggered back inside the house.
"Yep."
"Good onya. Here's yer two bucks."
About half an hour later, the old man went to the shops and when he pulled back into the driveway he saw I'd only mowed our side of the nature strip.
"Come 'ere," he grumbled. Out on the nature strip he jerked a thumb at my handiwork. "Mate, you know what that is?" he asked.
"Ummm ..." I said.
"It's un-Australian! Go get the mower and finish the other side. And gimme that two bucks back."
Ever since that day, at maybe a dozen homes I've rented - and now at the place the bank is letting me stay in - I have mowed every single nature strip I have shared with a neighbour. I've taken as much care of their side with the whipper snipper as mine and even swept clippings off their driveways.
Conversely, I once rented a place that shared a nature strip that was honestly about the size of a billiard table. The week after I moved in, the people next door mowed their side and left mine long. It was a mound and looked like the crown of a big, green half-shaved head. Un-Australian.
So if you happen to be mowing the lawn on Monday, you know what to do.
■ I'm not going to bang on about the confected terror the media whips up about sharks swimming in the ocean (who knew?). I've already had my say about that in these pages. However, since it happened just a stone's throw from where I live, I'd like to offer some thoughts on Mollymook teenager Sam Smith's encounter with a juvenile bronze whaler at Bannister Head on January 11.
Sam and his mate Luke Sisinni were spearfishing off the rocks. Sam spotted a shark swimming a little further out. So, equipped with a GoPro camera (their motto is "be a hero"), Sam dived deep in search of it. When our hero found the shark, it turned towards him. Sam stabbed it with his speargun so the shark bit the hand holding the spear - as you would.
The kid is gonna be OK and so is the shark. But every newspaper I saw went with their typical fear-and-loathing, sharkageddon headlines thus blowing their chances of a classic: SHARK SURVIVES BOY ATTACK!