I DON'T do Australia Day. Increasingly, it feels like a contrived opportunity to sell garish "Straya" tat made in China, and a middle-finger salute to any indigenous Australians who inconveniently equate   January 26 with sorrow, not pride.
Puffed-up patriotism doesn't sit well with me, either. "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi" sounds ghastly and groups of back-slapping blokes draped in Australian flags scream "exclusion", not unity. 
If there's one national day that feels authentic, that genuinely has a place in my heart as being worthy of Australian pride and commemoration, it's Anzac Day.
It's not something I've always felt. Like many, I suspect, it's crept up on me in recent years. And it was only last year, on a visit to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, that I got a sense of why Anzac Day is fulfilling, while Australia Day simply lacks.
It lies in the words of Australia's official war correspondent, Charles Bean, who was so inspired by our troops in World War I that he made it his life's work to write a 12-volume history of their stories and create a memorial in their honour.
Bean's guiding principles for the Australian War Memorial were simple: "Avoid glorification of war and boasting of victory".
No hubris. No false platitudes. No Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Just "bare, uncoloured" accounts of ordinary men and women who did what they thought was right, did what they were told, and often died in the process.
The population of the newly-formed Commonwealth of Australia was under five million at the outbreak of World War I. More than 60,000 (or one out of every 100) had been killed by the end. One of the things that struck me most at the war memorial - and again this week at the excellent Spirit of Anzac Centenary Experience exhibition - was how relatively short the Gallipoli campaign was.
For all our fascination with that single chapter of the war, it ran for just eight months.
The poor buggers who somehow survived Gallipoli were then shipped off to the Western Front where, in Bean's words, "The men were simply turned in there as into some ghastly giant mincing machine".
By 1918, just 17 years after Federation, their endeavours earned us a place at the international table. The Versailles Treaty was the first such international treaty signed by Australia in our own right. We'd arrived on the world stage.
"Lest we forget" is always the lingering message when Australians ponder our war history - and rightly so. How else can we do justice to the men and women who've fought and died so we can live in our beautiful little bubble that is Australia?
But I think we also have a responsibility to ask "What have we learned?" Hundreds of thousands of men returned after World War I with permanent physical injuries and/or the mental scars of what was then termed "war neurosis". Alcoholism and suicide were common.
Coincidentally, on the drive home from the Spirit of Anzac exhibition on Wednesday, I heard the daughter of a Vietnam veteran being interviewed by the ABC's Richard Fidler about how her family suffered at the hands of her deeply unstable father.
She said suicide rates are three times higher among the children of Vietnam veterans. It's a terrible postscript to a dreadful chapter; one that saw traumatised vets slogging through hell before returning home to an ungrateful nation.
Then, on ABC TV, one of the leaders of the Australian campaign in Afghanistan revealed that within months of arriving home, he was admitted to a mental health ward for the criminally insane. "I couldn't stop crying," he said.
Last year at the Anzac Day service at Aldgate, local RSL president Ian Campbell caused a stir by suggesting the $100 million Australian war museum being built in France would be better spent on mental health for vets back home.
He's got a point.
Anzac Day is a wonderfully authentic day of understated national pride and solemn remembrance. But lest we forget, they're not all dead.
â-  The Spirit of Anzac Centenary Experience is on at the Wayville Showgrounds until   March 20. Entry is free but bookings are mandatory. (www.spiritofanzac.gov.au) LAINIE.ANDERSON@ NEWS.COM.AU@anderson_lainie