AT school assemblies we'd often sing Waltzing Matilda with such a roar and gusto we'd run out of breath, even if we didn't know the words beyond verse one.
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Youthful innocents; seizing on a tune, like old friends returning to something peculiarly theirs.
I didn't witness such stirring patriotism again, until outnumbered British fans brought the roof down with the Negro slavery hymn Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, when the Brits' stole the Rugby Word Cup from Australia in 2003.
In 2011, as our cruise ship pulled out of Gibraltar, with a departing singalong at the stern of the vessel, a few hundred predominantly British passengers, swayed, waved and sung their hearts out with the Anglo favourites Rule Britannia, Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem.
We Aussies just stood there enviously, and choked up over the passion of our Pom fellow passengers. We didn't dare even hum our own ditty.
We, the Antipodeans, have that aryan tune, not unlike a theme from a TV satire, called Advance Australia Fair.
This dud ballad, with its soothing supermarket melody, is pure comic relief, when sung against great emotional chokers like La Marseillaise and Jerusalem.
On Saturday night at the Albert Hall, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, along with the brilliant Soprano Greta Bradman, granddaughter of Sir Donald, treated a packed house to the best of British nationalism.
"We're a carefree, larrikin bunch, not given to overt passion. An unassuming nation of retiring islanders, too politically correct and too imbued with inferiority, to worry about a national identity, let alone defend it."
We sung Jerusalem, and Land of Hope and Glory, and for a moment a republic seemed appropriately so far away. Even God Save The Queen sounded like a real anthem, although I admit to remaining patriotically seated during all verses.
I could go to war fearlessly, belting out Land of Hope and Glory, or the French national anthem La Marseillaise, but I wouldn't leave the docks with that joke of a clown's singalong, Advance Australia Fair.
Inexplicably it won a referendum in 1977, ironically when the top song on the Australian hit parade was Julie Covington's emotional outpouring Don't Cry for Me Argentina, about Argentinian leader Eva Peron.
No thought is ever given to the great, romantic yarn about a loveable swagman who steals a sheep from the squattocracy and vanishes into a billabong before the cops can nab him.
I keep asking myself why Australians were so dumb to choose that other comic, seemingly racist emblem of mediocrity.
I know the answer. We're a carefree, larrikin bunch, not given to overt passion. An unassuming nation of retiring islanders, too politically correct and too imbued with inferiority, to worry about a national identity, let alone defend it.
Gallipoli will do, for want of something perhaps too intangible for our shallow mindset to grapple with. War, based on fear, seems to suffice as a kick-starter of Australian consciousness.
We celebrate and solemnise retreats and defeats on the battlefield, at Gallipoli and Kokoda, while we are ever startled and shocked when an underdog Aussie team wins at international sport.
This is the mentality that lumbered us with that vacuous shopping music called Advance Australia Fair, with lyrics so benign to be better forgotten.
At the Albert Hall we sang ourselves stupid, waved our British flags and so easily understood why the mother country is called Great Britain.
At the Olympic Games, despite extraordinary efforts by our competitors against vastly more populated countries, we unfurl a flag that looks like New Zealand's and roll out an anthem that epitomises music for a wander through a supermarket, or meal time at a retirement village.
New Australians have a better idea of our land than we do. Is it any wonder, that after a social reccy, they resign themselves to their own expatriate culture.
