FOR the second year in a row, I spent most of Australia Day at the Grantville traffic lights on Bass Highway waving the Australian flag to motorists out of patriotic pride in my country, in the face of what is now a systematic attack on its colonial migrant and settler roots, by an ideological minority that was decisively rejected during the so-called Voice referendum.

In doing this, I acknowledge that modern migrants built this land, from bands to nationhood, wilderness to domestication, wanderment to settlement, subsistence to food bowl, scraping to mining, just enough to mass production, memorisation to knowledge system and, superstition to science.

My British ancestors left us modern economic infrastructure, the rule of law, civil rights and democratic governance. They raised a beacon born of hope, now the envy of the world for all who enter here, bent on economic participation, the exercise of citizenship, ambition and honest toil.

We are forever in their debt for their sacrifice and hardships that they endured making our beautiful country possible.

Aboriginals are invited to this now great multicultural experiment in the Far South Pacific. They lost their old world but have much more to gain in the one in front of them, which is why people from terrible places and broken worlds die trying to get here.

Who wants to go back to hunting and gathering? Anybody? Would the Chinese, the Hindu and Muslim principalities of South East Asia, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Maori or Japanese Imperial

Army have made better colonial masters than my ancestors? I don’t think so.

Christopher Nagle, Grantville