COME CLOSER WHILE I tell you this. Let me whisper in your ear. No one likes a dissenter. No one likes a deserter. I can’t say this too loudly. So huddle up while I tell you a secret.

I am leaving Dorothea Mackellar’s sunburnt country for snowflakes in the north. I’m crossing the equator, because Down Under can never be home to a woman who wants to be on top. I am turning my back on Australia Day for Martin Luther King Day. I may even prioritise Thanksgiving over Christmas. And on the fourth of July I will be out celebrating a different red, white and blue. The greenback might be in strife but the rainbow-fish coloured bills of our currency are a joke everywhere in the world, except New Zealand. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ doesn’t even come close to the ‘Star Spangled Banner’. And before you ask, yes, I know all the words. I even know the second verse by heart. So much the worse. We may ‘toil with hearts and hands to make this Commonwealth of ours, renowned throughout the lands’, but it can’t compete with ‘Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?’