Our country is a continent of contrasts and its people can be a nation of contradictions. Grantlee Kieza looks at what it means to be Australian in this day and age
WE CLING to the edge of a vast and hostile continent, not only surviving in this ancient landscape but thriving.
From humble beginnings as the dumping ground for Britain's detritus we have become one of the wealthiest and smartest nations in the world.
Next month our population will reach 24 million and only a handful of countries can match our standard of living. We are tough and resolute, our hardiness spiced by a larrikin sense of humour. 
We fight back from droughts and fires and flooding rains but, increasingly, we are seduced by creature comforts and a sedentary lifestyle. Our tradition is built on bush folklore, yet 89 per cent of us live in air-conditioned luxury on a narrow coastal fringe thousands of kilometres from our rugged heart.
Most of us eat too much, drink too much and weigh too much. We smoke less than we did a decade ago but four out of 10 Australians have tried illicit drugs. A third of us say we have slept with a co-worker but only half of us have satisfying sex lives.
We made the world's first feature film and have been at the forefront of medical science and computer technology. Yet more and more we make less and less, closing our factories, laying off our workers and stocking our houses and offices with Asian imports.
We are a nation of immigrants but have a history of intolerance - even cruelty - against the people who were here first. Half of us have reservations about Muslims and a third of us aren't too sure about Jews, Asians or black Africans.
On Tuesday, we celebrate Australia Day.
But 228 years after Europeans first settled here, what does it really mean to be Australian?
WHO WE ARE Our nation is one of the most urbanised, yet most sparsely populated continents on Earth. Our 60,000km coastline is greater than the circumference of the Earth but 60 per cent of us live in just six cities beside the sea.
In Australia's vast, harsh outback the population ratio is one person for every 10 square kilometres. In the major cities it's 50,000 and growing as our homes become smaller, our neighbours come closer and we move into claustrophobic highrises.
We are also living much longer. There are 4000 Australians aged over 100 - more than double since 1994.
An Australian born in the 1880s had a life expectancy of 54. An Australian born now can expect to live 30 years longer.
We love cars. Twelve million of us commute every day, choking increasingly stressed road networks designed more than a century ago.
We like to talk. We have more phones than people. We write fewer letters than ever and they cost more to send.
Everyone is rushing.
Each year, one in five of us will experience a mental illness and we are losing our religion.
In the 2011 census, 61.1 per cent of Australians took solace in Christianity, down from 67.3 per cent 10 years earlier.
Almost a quarter of us have no faith to lose.
Sixty per cent of women work. Two thirds aged between 18 and 49 use contraception and a third of babies are born to unmarried parents.
Nearly 70 per cent of Australian adults are overweight, our excesses fuelled as the sixth richest country in the world, ahead of Sweden, Singapore and the United States when it comes to gross domestic product.
WHO WE WERE When the First Fleet arrived in Australia on   January 26, 1788, they brought with them 1336 British settlers, soldiers and convicts. The indigenous population was estimated to have been somewhere between 315,000 and 750,000.
In the 2011 Census, 495,757 respondents declared they were Aboriginal, 31,407 were Torres Strait Islanders and 21,206 said they were both.
The First Fleet carried seven horses, seven cattle, 29 sheep, 74 pigs, five rabbits, 18 turkeys, 29 geese, 35 ducks and 209 fowls and, in time, we all rode high on the sheep's back. By the 1850s there were 39 sheep per head of the Australian population, compared with three today.
The Australian workforce has gradually moved from the land to the office and more women work than ever before to help pay for Australia's increasingly lavish lifestyles. The small flat or two-bedroom fibro shack that once was the first home for so many couples starting out has been replaced by the four-bedroom, two- bathroom detached house with pool, air-conditioning and flat-screen televisions. Most homes have two cars in the -garage.
A hundred years ago less than 40 per cent of Australia's population lived in capital cities and the median age was 22. It is now 37 and climbing.
Australia's total fertility rate fell from an average of 3.1 babies per woman of child bearing age in 1921 to 1.9 babies in 2011, with women now having more career options and greater reproductive control.
Fifty years ago the most common jobs in Australia were tradesmen, production process workers and labourers (44 per cent) with farmers, fishermen and timber getters totalling 12 per cent.
Agriculture and mining now accounts for only 5 per cent of Australia's workforce while 22 per cent of Australians list themselves as "professionals" with clerical and administrative workers making up another 15 per cent.
WHERE WE COME FROM Nine in 10 Australians are of European descent and one in four was born overseas. The UK (1.2 million), New Zealand (617,000), China (447,000) and India (397,000) were our biggest sources for new Australians in 2014.
In the 1800s, the British dominated migration to Australia and we adopted their ways but our society gradually became less focused on class.
In the year we became a nation, though, we officially became an intolerant one with the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, a White Australia policy that lasted for more than 70 years. Our first prime minister Edmund Barton explained that Australian equality was conditional. "There is no racial equality," he said. "The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman." On some of the goldfields in the 1850s Chinese miners were scalped or driven off with whips and guns and more than 150 years later there is a -similarly threatening rhetoric from some elements of our country towards Middle--Eastern -refugees.
WHAT WE ARE LIKE Our national ethos was built on the "fair go" for the working man but as Dr Sev Ozdowski from the University of Western Sydney explains the early Australian "fair go" was like the Athenian concept of democracy which applied only to Athenian men and excluded women, those with disabilities and those with a different accent.
In 19th century Australia the "fair go" was generally the preserve of caucasian males. That began to change on the goldfields where two of those arrested after the Eureka Rebellion at Ballarat in 1854 were black.
We embraced protest as we symbolically cast off the shackles of England. In the 1850s Australian activists campaigned successfully for an eight-hour working day and improved labour conditions.
We made heroes of rebel leader Peter Lalor and the cop-killing bandit Ned Kelly. Suffragettes such as Henrietta Dugdale led the fight for women's rights and in 1897 South Australia became the first place in the world to allow women to stand for Parliament.
We also take pride in our bravery and resourcefulness, whether facing foreign powers or the relentless forces of Mother Nature.
John Monash, the son of German Jewish parents, symbolised Australia's egalitarian spirit as he became our supreme commander in World War I. He said the success of his troops was down to their democratic institutions, a rugged outdoor background and the teamwork and camaraderie of the sporting field.
We love sport, always have.
Swimming is the most common sporting activity in Australia and walking a close second. Five million Australians participate in organised sport but we enjoy watching it even more than playing it.
Two million of us went to the races last year and more than 101,000 were at Flemington to see Michelle Payne steer Prince of Penzance home in the $6.2 million Melbourne Cup. Australians wagered $26 billion on sport in 2015, a third of a billion on the Cup alone.
The AFL remains Australia's most popular spectator sport with 6.6 million fans at games last year and average crowds of 32,841. Cricket's newly formed Big Bash runs second, followed by Super Rugby, the NRL and the -A-League soccer.
WHAT WE ARE GOOD AT While Australia has produced iconic sports stars such as Don Bradman, Dawn Fraser, Ian Thorpe, Rod Laver and Betty Cuthbert, we are clever and -artistic too.
Australian Dave Warren created the black box flight recorder in 1961 and four years later Jack Grant, of Qantas, invented the inflatable aircraft escape slide. In 1926 Dr Mark Lidwill made a heart pacemaker and Professor Fiona Wood patented her spray-on skin technique in 1999.
In 2006 Professor Ian Frazer discovered a vaccination for cervical cancer. Howard Florey and his team of scientists purified penicillin and John O'Sullivan and the CSIRO developed Wi-Fi technology.
Australians can also take much of the credit for Google Maps, polymer bank notes, cochlear implants, the electric drill, ultrasound scanners, plastic spectacle lenses, permanent-crease clothing, the ute, the Victa lawnmower, the winged keel and the Hills hoist.
Since the world's first feature film -- the 1906 epic The Story of the Kelly Gang - Australians Ken G. Hall, George Miller, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush and Heath Ledger among others have won Academy Awards. Australian authors Patrick White and the South African-born J.M. Coetzee have won Nobel prizes for literature.
WHERE WE ARE GOING Our population is booming and is expected to double in 45 years. Queensland is tipped to grow from about five million now to 11.1 million in 2061 when Brisbane will be a metropolis of 5.6 million. Living past 100 will be common.
But will we be happier? Will we eat more healthily, be less depressed and be more sexually satisfied? Will the drug scourge be over?
Findings were recently released of a 12-year survey conducted by leading universities into racism. Half of us harbour anti-Muslim sentiments and a quarter are anti-Semitic. One in three admits racist feelings against indigenous people.
In 2061 will we still be rich and living the dream?
Perhaps by then all Australians will realise that there is enough of this country for everyone to share. That our land abounds in nature's gifts. And that our surf, sun, snow, the great outdoors and the enthusiastic spirit of Australia - the best things in life - are free.grantlee.kieza@news.com.au