Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
I’m patriotic, but I’m not nationalistic.
Nationalism, as I understand it, is loyalty sharpened into superiority. It needs an “us” that feels threatened, and it often looks for a “them” to blame. Patriotism is different. Patriotism is love of home—paired with responsibility. It isn’t blind. It isn’t defensive. It doesn’t require denial.
At its best, patriotism is affection with moral clarity: the ability to say, this place matters to me, and therefore it matters what we do here.
There are things I genuinely love about Australia.
I love our laconic sense of humour—the dry understatement that can puncture ego and take the heat out of drama. I love Medicare, not just as a policy but as a shared instinct: that health isn’t a prize for the fortunate, but a common good worth protecting. I love the quiet miracle of peaceful handovers of power after elections—the stability of it, the way we can disagree fiercely and still keep faith with the process.
I love libraries: those calm, egalitarian spaces where you can be curious without having to justify yourself. I love firefighters—the way they go, again and again, when the rest of us can only watch the horizon and hope. I love our national parks, too: the gift of wildness and beauty, the reminder that the land is older than our anxieties and larger than our arguments.
I love the everyday richness of multicultural Australia—the languages on a train, the mix of cuisines in a single street, the fact that our national story has been written by many hands and many journeys.
And I love surf life saving. There’s something deeply Australian about it: ordinary people trained and ready, watching the water, moving toward danger for the sake of strangers. It’s practical compassion. It’s community made visible. It’s pride without posturing.
But if I’m honest—and honesty is part of what makes patriotism worth anything—there are things I find hard to accept about Australia too.
I grieve our ongoing indifference to the plight of Indigenous Australians: the way we can enjoy the story of the land while ignoring the wound in its centre. I grieve the cruelty we have shown toward refugees and asylum seekers—the moral hardening that happens when fear is dressed up as policy. I grieve the racism that is never far beneath the surface, the casual assumptions that still slip into conversation, the reflex to exclude or diminish.
I’m also uneasy about some of our habits that feel less like larrikin charm and more like entitlement—especially when Australians travel in groups and forget what it means to be guests. And I worry about our reluctance to invest in innovative ideas: the way we can settle for what’s familiar when the future is asking us to be braver.
None of this cancels my love. It tests it. It clarifies what kind of love it is.
Because love that can’t face the truth isn’t love—it’s sentimentality. And pride that can’t tolerate critique isn’t loyalty—it’s insecurity. If this country is home, then it’s worth telling the truth about it. And if we belong here, then we’re accountable for what we normalise, what we excuse, and what we repair.
So yes, I’m patriotic. Not because I think Australia is better than other places, but because this is the community that has formed me. It’s the society whose values I want to strengthen, whose worst instincts I want to resist, and whose future I want to be more humane than its present.
I love this country enough to want it to be kinder.
The Afterword 
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