A day in mid-January, floating in a kayak on an estuary somewhere between Melbourne and Sydney and covered up in summer uniform – bucket hat, rash vest, board shorts and plenty of sunscreen.
Also floating in the estuary (on bright yellow plastic paddle boats) are four women, also covered up: long trousers, long-sleeved tops, head scarves that could be hijab or part of a sari.
The women are camping with their families, with big four-wheel-drives pulled up beside tents on the foreshore like everyone else. They walk around the tent city crowded with families more easily identifiable as "Australian", bold enough, brave enough, or aware that it doesn't matter enough to most people if they keep their heads covered among the crew-cab utes, motor homes and fishing boats. No local mayor is going to send the police to make them strip on the beach.
The town is one big campsite in January, and strolling after dark you see thousands of people at hundreds of campsites lit by fairy-light strings of solar-powered LEDs.
The sound of Latin music rises from a group of tents somewhere in the dark, followed by raucous singing in Spanish and someone drumming on an empty plastic jerrycan. No one is going to tell these people to speak English, please, or to go back to where they came from.
It's customary as January 26 approaches to squabble over celebrating our national holiday on the date when the British established their first colony in what they called New South Wales.
For some Australians it marks the start of the invasion of the continent they have lived on since the beginning of time; for others, the first steps in an enterprise that transplanted the customs and culture of a small group of islands in the northern hemisphere to a big group of islands in the southern hemisphere; and for some it marks the day the first boatload of refugees arrived on these shores, the ancestors of all us non-indigenous boat people.
The best you can say about Australia Day is that it allows so many interpretations and forms part of so many different ideas about who we are, what we've done, and what we're doing here; try as some people might, no one has been able to impose a single narrative on our national day.
It's a reminder, like the campsite women with covered heads and the raucous Spanish singers, that the story of what it means to be Australian has many different strands.
Oh, and it's also a reminder that the summer holidays are over: time for us all to brush the sand off our toes and get back to whatever it is we do for the other 11 months of the year.
Matt Holden is a Fairfax Media columnist.
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