Much of the advice you received as a child is now redundant. For example, don’t even think about telling an Australian under the age of twenty that, ‘Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names can never hurt you’. It is a maxim conceived, after all, by a generation which had fought at Kokoda and whose own parents could remember Gallipoli. The idea that children can cause or incur serious injury by trading insults would have seemed as silly to them as the idea of wearing a helmet to ride a bicycle. In pre-snowflake Australia, bullying was only taken seriously if it had a physical dimension, and not all physical pain was adjudged harmful. When teachers functioned in loco parentis rather than in loco karlmarxis, corporal punishment was deemed salutary, not actionable.

‘Finders keepers, losers weepers’ has an even older provenance, being an adaptation of a Roman law which said that if you picked up a dropped coin, and didn’t see who dropped it, you could keep that coin (at least until tax time, when you would be required to render it unto him whose profile it bore). I used to believe this was more or less the case in Australia. But then a friend of mine made the mistake of picking up a plastic bag in the carpark of a Sydney shopping centre. Seeing that the bag contained a couple of children’s T-shirts, and remembering how much he had spent clothing his own children, my friend tried unsuccessfully to find a car park attendant before taking the bag home, intending to hand it in on a future visit. But before he could do so, police viewed CCTV footage of my friend and his car and decided to press charges. Thanks partly to the glowing character witness statement I provided, but mainly to the application of common sense, the judge presiding at Burwood Local Court last Monday let my friend off with a warning. But not before the taxpayer had funded the action to the tune of who knows how much, and not before my friend was advised by his barrister to plead guilty to the charge of Larceny by Finding.

To have you convicted of Larceny by Finding, Australian prosecutors do not need to prove that you intended to permanently deprive the rightful owner of something you found. It is enough for them to convince a judge or jury that you didn’t try hard enough, quickly enough, to locate that owner. In parts of the US, Democratic legislation has made the same law even more of an ass. If my friend had found that plastic bag in the carpark of a shopping centre in Gavin Newsom’s California, he would certainly have been convicted, probably fined and – absent glowing character witness statements – possibly even imprisoned. But if the stuff in the bag was found to be stolen, and priced at less than US$950, and the shoplifter was shown to be homeless and to have sold the contents of the bag to fund a crack habit, he or she would not be charged with anything.

As well as being a cautionary tale about life in modern-day Australia, my friend’s experience sheds new light on what may be our oldest cold case. Thanks to archival data and the testimony of proper historians, the two charges which are the raison-d’être of Australian anti-colonialists have never been very compelling. If the arrival of the First Fleet really had been an invasion, as our children are now taught, it would have been the slowest and most under-resourced invasion in military history. And if the intention of the British really had been to commit systematic genocide, as Lidia Thorpe and her ilk contend, it has been the most unsuccessful genocide in human history; Australia’s indigenous population today being more than ten times what it was two hundred years ago. But perhaps we should not give those early settlers a completely clean slate. James Cook certainly had no intention of permanently depriving anybody of anything when he dropped anchor in Botany Bay. But sailing through Sydney Heads 18 years later, Arthur Phillip did spot a group of ‘manly’ locals watching from the cliffs. In the years which followed, moreover, he learned that the Cammeraygal were just one of several local tribes. But he also learned that none of them were sufficiently attached to the land they lived off to remain on any part of it for very long. And that except when it came to the weapons and tools they carried on their peregrinations, and were careful not to drop, none evinced anything which accorded with contemporaneous notions of ownership. So maybe George III wasn’t even guilty of Larceny by Finding.