Our national day should be a celebration, for Australia today – a wealthy nation, free, with boundless opportunities and irrepressible optimism – has a great deal to celebrate.

Yet there is an obvious difficulty.

For a significant group within our community – Indigenous Australians – today can be celebrated only as a day of mourning.

For the first Australians it commemorates invasion, dispossession and cultural near-annihilation.

At best, it can become a celebration not of nationhood, but of survival and rebirth after something close to death.

The symbolism of that shocking exclusion at the heart of Australia Day is so painful that this nation mostly refuses to face it. Its significance is denied or ignored.

Perhaps that is why for many years Australia Day itself was all but ignored.

These days we call that disconnection “typically Australian”, and we have turned it into a virtue.

Other nations have military march-pasts and official pomp on their national day; Australians are encouraged to celebrate with backyard barbecues and plenty of beer.

Anomaly? What anomaly? Have another sausage.

Some have called for Australia Day to be moved to a different date, to avoid giving offence to Indigenous Australians.

Although well-intended, that would be a mistake.

For good or ill, depending on one’s background and viewpoint, modern Australia did begin on this date.

To move the celebration would deal with a difficult issue by sweeping it under the carpet.

Australia, and Australians, are better than that. This is a country of realists – down-to-earth people who have little time for polite falsehoods and marketing ploys.

We can cope with complexity.

With all its contradictions and controversies, this day should include Australians from every background, and it should prompt every one of them to think clearly about our country, its people and history, and where it is headed.

It is that clear view of Australia which we should celebrate, not some treacly euphemism or embarrassed sidestepping of a vital issue.