I’m very proud of my heritage as a first-generation Australian. I also celebrate our world record, enduring ancient culture and the particular skills associated with it. Surveyor General Mitchell more than once acknowledged the supremacy of those skills over his own when exploring the country under difficult circumstances.

But the various tribes that inhabited our continent in 1788 were not nations and certainly didn’t speak with one voice. Aboriginal people of the Murrumbidgee helped Mitchell’s party to repel an attack from others who came from the Darling to make war. Neither tribe had flags. The idea of an Aboriginal Flag makes as little sense as a Voice to Parliament.

Our Nation was born in 1901. My family joined it when mum arrived in 1947 with the first shipload of second world war refugees. She presented Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell with a gift from Lithuanian refugees on the deck of the Kanimbla in Melbourne. Dad arrived in 1948. They met in Sydney. Mum completed her work contract as a nurse at Concord Repatriation Hospital and Dad worked as a laborer with the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board.

After they were married and my brother Alis was born in Camperdown, our family moved to Eaglehawk Neck, the construction camp for Eucumbene Dam. I was born in Cooma in 1955. Cooma has two avenues of flags to celebrate the different nations who contributed to building Australia through a fair-dinkum renewable energy and irrigation project – the Snowy Mountains Scheme. We’ll never see the likes again.

The first avenue was 27 flags. They didn’t include Lithuania’s or those of some other nations which were ‘Soviet socialist republics’ or otherwise repressed. Some were added later, but there’s been never-ending controversy about which flags and which versions in time should be represented. Lucky our young and free nation has only one.

Kids of the Snowy Mountains Scheme still cherish our diverse ancestry and the achievements of our elders. We looked forward to a TV series, advertised by the government-funded SBS, called Building The Snowy. The first episode on 23 August disabused us of any idea that it would celebrate our elders’ contribution to building modern Australia.

The program felt like propaganda trying to use the fair-dinkum Snowy Scheme to promote the lunacy of Snowy 2.0. Pumped Hydro consumes renewable energy from fair-dinkum hydro to prop up fake renewables. They presented more than enough info about the huge fully imported Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs), prefabricated liners etc. to horrify anyone with a commonsense view of ‘carbon accounting’.

SBS praised the huge expenditure on geological investigations and exploratory drilling, but neglected to mention that the 2,000-tonne TBM Florence has been bogged for eight months after a slow start of tunneling 60 cm a day – two feet in old speak.

The cynical use of the fair-dinkum Snowy Scheme to promote green ideology, the climate craze, and fake renewables distresses me. Many other Snowy Kids obviously feel the same.