What does it mean to be a -Canberran?

This may seem like a peculiar coupling, because it doesn't combine like with like and omits the entity to which I commonly swear allegiance and pay the most tax.

While I'm a proud Australian, my nationality and citizenship were passed down from my parents. Being Vietnamese-Canberran has been more of a choice. I chose to learn about Indochinese history and culture in my 20s. At around the same time, I chose to stay in Canberra when many of my childhood friends were drawn to the world beyond the Brindabellas.

So I have become Vietnamese-Canberran. And it's an ongoing, everyday process, especially on the Canberran side.

I encounter weather and traffic, do chores, play sport and celebrate with fellow Canberrans. While things like the economy, pandemics, climate change and social justice are often shaped by outside forces, I experience and influence them at home with folks who are an elbow tap away.

This does not mean that we should be ACT through and through. The hyphen counts. Indeed, that short linking line deserves our attention and appreciation.

In politics, the hyphen emerged to both develop and temper nationalism. The hyphen's a powerful symbol in the US, where immigrants flocked during the 1800s and early 1900s to form an immigrant nation with the marvellous motto "out of many, one". Today, many Americans refer to themselves as Italian-Americans, Japanese-Americans or Iranian-Americans, and their cities feature bustling Little Italys, Little Tokyos and Little Tehrans.

But there's also growing scepticism about the hyphen's multicultural value. In the US and Canada (which has been referred to as a "haven for hyphens"), some champions of diversity have rallied against that little flat middling line, arguing that it designates a neither/nor proposition that perpetuates marginalisation.

Most controversially, they contend that the horizontal hyphen masks hierarchy. The leading adjective is dominated by the noun that follows, with all its gendered, racial and class privilege. Moreover - so say the hyphen's critics - it acts as brackets. That is to say, defining one's identity by one, two or more ethnicities blocks out sexuality, dis/ability, sporting clubs, social networks and a myriad of other identities and affiliations.

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I once met someone who refused to say where she came from, explaining that "you'll learn more about me by asking what book I'm reading or what car I drive".

"Why can't we all just be Australian!?" or "Just be whatever your birth certificate or passport says!" I hear folks exclaim.

While the contemporary flourishing of identities can be confusing, we should resist the urge to return to the good old monocultural days, which were never that good anyway.

And we should not give up on the hyphen. Instead, we should use it with greater purpose and imagination. Perhaps I will start thinking of myself as a "-Vietnamese-Canberran-", the extra lines signalling all the possibilities out there to engage with diverse others, to truly and freely express oneself, and to belong to a range of wondrous places.

One of those places is Canberra. Of course, there are great challenges and wrongs in the ACT. But whether your connection to the territory spans millennia or months; whether you hail from the deep south or inner north; whether you grew up in a small two-beddie near the shops or in a five-bedroom place on the hill; whether you support the Capitols or the Calvary; whether you make quilts or ride dirtbikes - we Canberrans should be proud of our efforts to care for our environment, to honour the Ngunnawal and Ngambri, to look out for one another through fear and loss, and to become one of the safest, richest and most promising cities in human history.