I think there can be pride in our luck. We're an accident of history. I mean, our prosperity is a pretty huge fluke; we've been on the anglo-american winning side of recent history, and the agriculture and minerals of the land have been in high global demand just when we needed them to be. The result is a first world country capable of offering opportunity to anyone who wants it. THe best part is that it all comes without responsibility: we have no empire to maintain or real enemies who want us annihilated. It's a nice story of egalitarianism, where citizens have been safe and free to pursue their concept of the good life.
The shame is that we've usually churned out second rate men, whos greatest crimes have been omissions; failure to reform when reform was due. But that's to be expected. Prosperity breeds our laid-back complacency. This conservatism was perfectly summed up by the monarchist slogan 'if it aint broke, dont fix it'. It's unfortunate because AUstralians who've made a go of it and grapsed our fortune/potential have gone on to conquor the world - Murdoch, Keating, Doc Evatt, Peter Weir... Stever Erwin to name a few.
Other than that, I think we came into nationhood too late and in such a way as to make us miss the boat on old-fashioned patriotism. We're too mature for that, and see it as largely irrelevant and counter-productive in a globalized world. The greatest guilt Australians have is the fact that we are prosperous where others, disturbingly close, are not. THe problem of global poverty, and how best to deal with it, is a tough problem which we havent really worked out a workable solution to.
