Rodney Croome . gay advocate

A bright, cloudless antipodean sky

From a very little thing, my sense of national identity grows.

Can you spot any openly-LGBT people on this year’s Australia Day honours list?

I can see Peter Brennan AM, the former president of the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation and financial supporter of various gay and lesbian organisations.

If you come across anyone else let me know.

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Australia Day isn’t my cup of tea, especially this year because the boyf is in Melbourne for work and I’m here…blogging.

Most nationalism turns me off.

The kind of low-brow nationalism that celebrates barbeques, intoxication and sunburn, and largely overlooks Australia's achievements in the world of the mind and the heart, is particularly repelling.

I’d go so far as to say it repells most Australians, but they’re too polite or afraid to say it.

I’m not a contrarian by nature. I want to find a way to participate.

But this is made very hard by the ridiculously narrow terms in which Australian national identity is defined.

As a gay man and as a Tasmanian my place is in this identity is peripheral, at best.

Popular images and ideas about what it means to be Australian barely if ever include homosexuals or Vandemonians.

If they do, it is more often than not a way of demonstrating what about “Australianess” is second-rate, unworthy, broken or at high risk of being un-Australian.

That can leave me staring at a banknote or a passport and wondering whether the word “Australia” means anything to me at all.

There is truth and beauty in what I feel for my same-sex partner and in what I feel for my muddy island home.

But is there anything true and beautiful that unites me with other Australians?

If there is, it will be found, not in flag waving and jingoism, but in the smallest of things.

One such thing I came across just the other day.

I was cleaning the house when my iPod shuffled into “From little things big things grow” by Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody.

The song itself inspires love and hope for Australia. It says that we can be a just people.

But there is something else quite remarkable near the end of the song, just before the song's writers let loose a Fitzroy-pub-style jam session complete with didgeridoo.

Kelly and Carmody introduce a children's choir to chorus his song’s refrain (which is the same as the title).

The nasally pronunciation of the sound “oh” in the word “grow” - elongated until it is almost a diphthong - is a unique marker of an Australian accent, something we all share no matter where we live or what background we come from, and something which isn’t heard anywhere else.

It is more common in, and peculiar to, Australia than, say, the equally nasally and elongated "ay" sound in "mate", despite "ay" being more often recognised as "Australian".

Often the Australian "oh" is lampooned. The way the characters of Pru and Tru in the comedy series "Kath and Kim" strangle the sound with their now-famous line about "jojoba left over from October" is just one of many examples.

Not surprisingly, Australians who want to appear cultured or worldly often go to great lengths to turn their "oh" into a rounder, throatier sound.

The choir in Kelly’s song pronounce "grow" in an unmistakably, perhaps even deliberately, Australian way.

But there is nothing silly or ugly about it. Their “oh” is so pure and beautiful it soars up into a bright, cloudless antipodean sky and takes the listener’s heart with it.

When I hear that sound I realise I am linked to other Australians by much more than just currency and official documents.

I am linked by a language, history and culture that can transcend all its limits and stray effortlessly into beauty.

And about that link I am immensely proud.

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In other news, Margaret Court is an Australian with whom I’m not entirely happy to share a nationality.