Why we should move Australia Day from January 26 to May 25

And so your columnist leaps to offer some properly patriotic (but inoffensive and acceptable to all) alternatives. For example, why not May 25?

The Readers: "Why May 25, enigmatic columnist?"

I will explain May 25 in a moment. But first I ask us to notice how mind-bogglingly time-bounteous a year is. There are 52 yawningly-wide weeks the size of a bigger Grand Canyon, 365 echoingly roomy days of our lives, 8760 uncrowded hours, 525,600 minutes (each one as big as the Ritz) and then a lavish galaxy of 31,536,000 plenteous seconds. With all this room at our nation's disposal it is a shame we have fixed Australia Day in this one contentious corner of a year's roomy room.

And oh the towering insensitivity of those, led by our endlessly disappointing prime minister, who cannot put themselves in the shoes of those first Australians who find 26 January a painful day.

Yes, our prime minister (that shameless chameleon) and the shock-jocked Daily Telegraph classes don't want a change of date. Yet last September's Guardian Essential poll found that there are now some 26 per cent of us in favour of a brand new, better day. Change is coming. It is time to offer ultra-cautious, sheep-like Australians some alternative Australia Day dates that don't alarm and stampede them.

How about, say, a day in the life and career of our Don Bradman? Sport is about all of life. Had Shakespeare known of them he would have written deep plays about Don Bradman, about Rod Laver, about tragic Phar Lap.

Cricket is a vital ingredient of the national DNA and is played and watched by all Australians of all genders and complexions. And some of Bradman's achievements as the greatest batman there has ever been coincided with the bleak years of the Great Depression and so put some powerful effervescence into the national mood.

So how about, for Australia Day, July 11? On July 11, 1930, the first day of a Test against England at Leeds, Bradman (just 21) walloped, caressed and tickled a triple century by close of play, setting a miscellany of records.

Or, what of a significant day in the life of Nellie Melba? She was our nation's first global superstar and, what's more, a superstar of opera, one of the towering creative achievements (right up there with the invention of cricket) of our species?

As well as her divine warbling she was a true patriot, and did sterling fundraising work during the Great War. Why not, for Australia Day, October 13, the day on which in 1887 she made her debut as an opera singer at the Theatre Royal in Brussels, going on to enchant all of Europe?

Or how about, for Australia Day, November 4? It is the day on which, in 1930, dear Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup. Again, as Shakespeare would testify if he could (with sonnets and plays) there is so much more to Phar Lap and to the Melbourne Cup than mere matters of horseflesh and horse racing.

What of, as a possible Australia Day, December 10? For on December 10, 1973 our Patrick White was presented (in his absence because he was too unwell to beetle from Sydney to Stockholm) with his well-deserved Nobel Prize in Literature for his fabulous fictions all about Australia and Australians. All cultured and generous Australian bosoms swelled with pride on the day our Patrick brought us literary glory.

The Readers: "But Ian, what about the May 25 date you mentioned at the beginning of today's beguiling column?"

I thought that if we chose one great day in the achievements of one great cerebral Australian it might symbolise the great days of all brainy Australians, men and women we can be proud of in utterly bipartisan ways. A date of this kind would lift us out of the partisan ditch of January 26.

And so, reading Dr Simon Torok's Maker of the Miracle Mould, Torok's song of praise to our Nobel Laureate the pharmacologist and pathologist Howard Florey, one comes across this thrilling passage. By May of 1940 Florey had assembled at Oxford University a brainy team.

"His team," Torok explains, "commenced a careful investigation of the properties of anti-bacterial substances that are produced by mould."

"In May, 1940 they performed one of the most important medical experiments in history. The work was so urgent [because of the war] that they came in to begin the experiment on the weekend, and on Saturday May 25, Florey's team tested penicillin on eight mice injected with a lethal dose of streptococci bacteria. Four of the mice were treated with penicillin, while four were used as controls. By the next day, the treated mice had recovered and the untreated mice were dead. In the early days of World War II, the lives of eight mice may seem insignificant. But their rescue by penicillin led to the treatment of Allied soldiers as early as D-Day, in June 1944, and probably influenced the outcome of the war."

It is days like these, like momentous May 25, our Australia Day should honour and rejoice over.