Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I started to compose my remarks to you today on Christmas Eve as I was en route to see our servicemen and women on duty in Iraq and neighbouring states and waters over the Christmas period.

As I sat in the aircraft heading overseas, I thought of all the departures and homecomings I have had over the years and like many of you how at such times we reflect keenly on family, on community and on Australia. In fact I think for most of our people in the military, the keenest insights into our ‘Australian-ness’ are gained from the outside looking in, so to speak. As a people we are often enough criticised by our own and by others for our lack of introspection. In fact some of us would say we cannot abide navel-gazing when there is a life to be lived and things we really want to do. But when we are far away from home and loved ones we often do a lot of thinking. A long telescope seems to bring Australia into sharp focus.

A few nights ago, I was privileged to be a participant in an ABC television show where panellists advocated to a jury their selection for the accolade, ‘the Greatest Australian’. The jury selected one of these and the person chosen was most worthy – I won’t tell you who, because the programme doesn’t screen until Monday evening and Geraldine Doogue, the presenter would never forgive me. But preparing for and participating in the show was a perfect preparation for the honour of delivering the Batman Oration.

John Batman. A colourful and controversial figure like so many of those energetic and indefatigable pioneers of the early colonial period, he is very rightly recognised, as the ‘Founder of Melbourne’ and as Australian-born, to give his name to the address and the theme today.

One part of Batman’s achievements I think we are all glad did not endure was his original name for this great metropolis, “Bearbrass”. It doesn’t roll off the tongue does it? Can you imagine playing for the Bearbrass Football Club or watching Bill Lawry bat on the Bearbrass Cricket Ground, or attending the running of the Bearbrass Cup. I understand the name change to Melbourne was dictated by Governor Bourke of NSW in 1837 – the last favour NSW did for Victoria!

In order to say what it means to be an Australian, its important to review and consider what there is about us which is empirically unarguable. Part of that fabric is of course our history, including the achievements of Batman and his ilk, the explorations and the discoveries, the wars, the floods and droughts, the triumphs, the mistakes and injustices, all assessed and acknowledged without coyness or emotion. Of course even a view of history is often subjective and inevitably lengthy, so I’m going to squib and move on to some more contemporary observations.

To be an Australian today is to have about twenty million countrymen here at home and spread widely around the world, but concentrated in three great overseas groupings: the US, the UK and South East Asia. To be Australian today is to be part of a great ethnic potpourri, where a great many of our citizens have come to us directly or in recent past generations from every corner of the globe, in numbers and diversity well in excess of that of the first half of our Australian nationhood.

Our education standards are very high. Importantly, our literacy in regional and world affairs is keen and informed, very high compared to most others – our geographic isolation and our outlook hone this keenness of gaze. This, combined with our sophisticated and well developed, pervasive communications infrastructure confers on Australia a real ‘knowledge edge’ at a grass-roots level.

We are mostly, but not invariably, relatively wealthy. Increasingly our wealth is dependent on regional and global trends and relationships. Our economy is evolving from one dominated by the export of primary produce, specifically raw materials, to one where value added products and services play a much greater part than in say the post World War II era. Our rural industry while modernising, is lapsing under the rigours of our ‘wide brown land’ combined with the pull of the cities. These factors and the changing structure of the economy have changed our demography.

Australia is a very healthy country. We survive infancy in greater numbers and live longer than the people of most other countries. We have standards of health care and broader welfare, higher than most other countries. In the way of things, these outcomes lead to lower birthrates and to an aging population.

Now on to one of these empirical conclusions which many of you will think slides into an area of subjectivity – that of our polity. It’s my view that our system and practise of democracy are so stable as to be an enduring influence on our Australian-ness. Not for us is the instability and apprehension of many other countries, mostly younger than us but many older, where the volatility and uncertainty of their political systems is a fact of life. Not for us, unthinkable for us, is the notion of deeply corrupt Governments, of coups, of routinely rigged elections. Even minor flaws in our multilayered democracy are invariably viewed as anomalous and unrepresentative.

Back onto more comfortable and even expected ground for me as a soldier. My last pervasive and enduring influence on our Australian condition is our geostrategic position. Sorry for the jargon, but of course I mean where we are and how we are placed both geographically and in the power continuum, firstly in our region and secondly, globally. Geography is eternal and similarly, many of the cultural and social relativities between ourselves and our neighbours are most enduring. Our place globally is also set geographically, with our global separation shrinking somewhat through technology. Our relative power globally is also likely to move only at the margins and not at all in relation to the globally significant nations and blocs.

Now that I have given this sort of thumbnail list, I feel I should add a postscript to each influencing factor, a sort of Australian corollary. Here I’m on shakier ground, because my opinion is no better than any of yours.

First, our population size, our expanded ethnic diversity and our inherent globe-trotting wander-lust together have a compounding effect. Comfortable assumptions about the enduring traits of a set of Anglo-Celtic national characteristics don’t invariably hold. Simply our national characteristics or more properly the characteristics of the people who make up the nation, are much more complex than we in our more romantic moments would like to think. Of course as time passes and our different groupings absorb one another, there will be some crudescence into a profile that keen scholars may be brave enough to detail. I do think though that some parts of our ‘Camelot of the Character’ shine through and I’ll get to them soon.

Our high level of education and our great access to communications and the way that allows us to improve and exploit and apply that education, have an interesting effect which sets us apart from the myth making generations from whom our idealised Australian character is drawn. We are endlessly informed and proselytised. We are no longer left to the privacy of our prejudices, to the ignorance of our isolation. We are on line, connected. The weather in Ulan Bator or the footy scores for Real Madrid are available at the press of a mobile phone button in the bus queue. Instead of the ubiquitous public approval of our rousing World War I slogan, “Australia will be there!” the Australian everyman now says, “hang on, that’s not what I’m seeing coming out of Asia on the BBC”. This development is of course a good thing, but plurality and diversity are now as automatic as perhaps consensus and uniformity were for the generations of the myth.

(Let me be careful in using the term myth. Myths are often hugely evocative, inspirational and powerful. They are just by nature hard to prove and touch.) With our wealth and the transformation of our economy comes further difference. We are as individuals and families, more independent, discriminating and demanding of governments and each other than when Australians’ disposable income was comparatively less. We are simply less able or willing to be mobilised through economic pressures than once was the case. With the diaspora from rural areas to the cities comes a vicious cycle which keeps our rural industry under enormous pressure – not the fault or failing of governments, which as governments should, respond to realities.

We are healthy, aging and having smaller families. This has created what I think are profound differences in lifestyle and expectations now to those of just a few generations ago. Are we now naturally a little more self-centred, perhaps more cynical and cautious than those forbears to whom life had dealt a different hand?

Back into the quicksand! Politics! Who’d be a modern politician, compared to the obviously halcyon days of yore? People today are now more informed and generally more cynical and questioning of political leadership. Standards of political behaviour and performance, the effectiveness of policies and the efficient use of taxes have much greater visibility and critical analysis. Precisely because of the strength of our democracy, this ferocious scrutiny and criticism often leads to a growing together of once distinctly different political ideologies and a closer similarity of policies so that a vigilant and empowered, confident electorate might take the plunge with this party or that. Of course it helps not to have two World Wars, neatly divided by a World Depression, to foster this political drift! I contend though that this enduring and stable political landscape both serves and in turn partly shapes our modern character.

Finally on our geostrategic circumstances: Australians have always been aware of the oddity of our placement in the global firmament. But now we are keenly aware of events and attitudes and influences within our region and this is mirrored more than ever in our psyche. To illustrate – in the middle of the twentieth century, if a tidal wave hit the north coast of Papua New Guinea, it would be hard to be terribly concerned about it because we probably would not have had accurate news of it until well after the event and even then our national ability to do much about it would have been quite limited. Now we do know immediately, we are expected to do something quickly and we expect the same of ourselves. We see the political, social and cultural issues of our neighbours and they see ours.

Still on a geostrategic theme and specifically addressing relative power in the world, let me take you into my confidence. Noting the established British practise of naming parts of Australia after prominent British persons, I may now reveal Australia’s plan for the future: during the next Ashes tour of England after we have belted the Poms in the test at Old Trafford in Manchester, Ricky Ponting will be empowered to proclaim that henceforth Manchester shall be known as Bradman.

So, much in our Australian condition has changed, perhaps more markedly and more rapidly than our beloved and treasured traditional image of our national character can comfortably absorb. Some things endure – the ‘wide brown land’ is still the same treasure and trial. The mystic bond of the original Australians with our shared land remains strong despite the crashing waves of other cultures.

So what is it to be Australian in 2004? Let me not waffle but again turn to empirical measurement.

It’s the sudden and unqualified courage in and around the Sari Club such as the two men, strangers to most others, who immediately and repeatedly greatly risked their lives to save victims from the flames. The award to them of the Cross of Valour, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross speaks volumes of how we regard such selfless courage in our national character. They of course typified many that night and thereafter. Courage too we saw from many ordinary Australians who, dreadfully injured there, suffered their pain with stoicism and cheerfulness and again selflessness, to inspire and move not just those around them but a whole nation when we learnt of their plight.

Australians prize and find in each other compassion in abundance. Let there be a calamity of any scale or nature and our communities large and small self-mobilise immediately to help those in need. I saw it in Canberra last year when a bushfire roared through the suburbs. Of course if I lived in Victoria I would have seen it frequently over my lifetime. This compassion, this sense of community, transcends all those influencing factors I laid out earlier. Tritely, we’d toy with mateship as the descriptor and I wouldn't mind if you called it that, but to me it is more because it needs no familiarity or existing bond, it calls upon our sense of responsibility, of generosity of spirit and of means. It is most certainly a gender neutral concept. It denotes a ready sense of identity with each other, with our communities and ultimately in a capstone way, with our country. It is the essence of our Australian-ness and thus our obligation. We honour that obligation time and time again. The town of Moora, in country Western Australia, three times over a short lifetime was devastated by floods. On each occasion that marvellous battling, indefatigable little community stuck together and hauled each other literally out of the mud and destruction. Moora was named Australian town of the year in 2001. While they were an outstanding community, it would be a very tough choice year in and year out because in Australia there are hundreds, probably thousands of communities like Moora.

Australians today are not ambivalent people. We are, and some may think us naively so, somewhat black and white in our views on issues of the day. I don’t think we are naïve for that reason, if at all. I think we have now, probably still have from the days of our forbears, a fundamental instinct for what’s right and wrong, a firm grasp of the pulse of what’s a fair go. That is something that hasn’t changed with the influences and pressures shaping the modern Australian character. With these and those other qualities I’ve spoken of, I do not contend that they are uniquely Australian, just that we like them when we see them in ourselves. We are glad to ascribe them then to our modern myth.

A final word on what it means to be an Australian. People here frequently worry and criticise that part of our character that deifies sport and similar diversions, in that it distracts us from the weightier issues of life. Thank heavens that when we hear that we nod sympathetically and then reach for the form guide, the zinc cream or the supporter’s scarf. Of course we go over the top, but it’s a symptom of our irreverent, dare I say it, indomitable confidence, a sort of joyous exuberance which says to the world at large, ‘look, we’ve got a great country where we enjoy our brief human time in the sun. We can do this and we can do anything!’ Let’s just excuse ourselves to the naysayers by declaring, ‘Sorry, it’s in our character!’

Flaws and problems we have in abundance. We should not ignore or gloss over these ever, not even on Australia Day; especially on Australia Day. But very frequently, when I see my kids, three young men starting out in the adult world, I give thanks that they are citizens of Australia.