If life has taught me anything it’s that love can only blossom if the timing is right. Good timing is the only way I can reasonably explain my disproportionately strong and almost certainly unrequited feelings towards the Guardian Australia commenting community.

How do I know them to love them so? I guess you could say I am a long-time lurker. But not in a creepy pre-internet way. Promise.

Finally I can publicly out myself as one of those who you know – anonymously by necessity – as “the moderators”. Now I know sometimes, usually in the heat of a moderated comment, you might think of mods as censorious killjoys. If you knew the clever, creative, driven, diverse, hardworking and thick-skinned people I’ve had the privilege of sharing the moderation desk with over the years, you’d know they are the antithesis of killjoy censors; they are the facilitators who allow the Guardian to maintain its mostly free and open comments sections when so many news outlets are shutting them down completely.

Had anyone told me when I first fell into moderating while a freelance journalist in London eight years ago that I’d go on to do it full-time, first from my home office in Glasgow and then from Sydney, I’d have been deeply sceptical.

But thanks to mysteries of timing, it turns out being a Guardian mod has been one of the happiest and most educational work-related accidents of my life. Getting to know the Australian community so well was the delicious icing on an already yummy cake.

You and your furphies, hoons, dorothy dixers, tuckerboxes, utes, roots, budgie smugglers and ever-evolving glossary of usually playful, often clever and always ego-piercing nicknames for the nation’s tall poppies came along just when I needed you.

Having monitored your discussions since that very first night, as it was for me, in 2013 when Guardian Australia launched, I think it’s fair to say we came along just as you needed us too.

Now, as I prepare to give up life as a mod to move to Melbourne (and become a rocker?), I need to shout from the rooftops about this extraordinary subset of what is already an impressive global commenting community, unique among the world’s news sites. While I fully respect, admire, learn from, enjoy, fight and otherwise advocate for the majority of the Guardian’s global online commenting communities (the good and great far outweigh the astroturfing and hate), it’s the regulars below the line of our distinctly Australian content that hold a special place in my heart.

Among the many loveable members of this community, resident poet GazzaFromGrongGrong embodies the prolific, playful, engaged, sometimes enraged, entertaining and welcoming comment sections they create and I’ve had the privilege to curate.

At first, the emergence of this commenting community meant regular exposure to words and phrases I’d been forced to banish from my daily lexicon for the sake of being understood. Your #wordswhereyouare got me in the mood, but realising I’d fallen for you came later.

Now don’t get me wrong, putting daps on before I walked to work in Bristol and deodorant on my oxsters before I went anywhere in Glasgow was not nowt to me. I thoroughly enjoy learning new slang and immersing myself in the appropriate regionalisms. As a kid who went to three schools in three states by the time I was in year 3, going from prep in Tasmania to kindy in New South Wales where I had to swap my bathers for cossies before packing my togs for Queensland, I developed an ear for these sorts of things.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching as my British mod colleagues encountered rorts for the first time and the frantic back-and-forth between them and the lawyers it sparked.

It wasn’t until the same-sex marriage debate in the lead-up to last year’s nonbinding postal survey that it finally dawned on me. I had moderated similar debates in the UK, US and in Ireland in the lead-up to their respective parliamentary votes, supreme court decisions and constitutionally mandated referendums needed to make same-sex marriage legal. These discussions festered with homophobia, and the mods worked tirelessly to keep comments within the bounds set by the community standards so that those who had important contributions to make could.

I was expecting similar and worse when it was Australia’s turn.

But the hurtful tropes and/or borderline hate barely made an appearance. The few attempts, whether misguided or malicious, to spout the sort of ugliness seen in the comparable UK, US and Irish debates were so thoroughly, yet respectfully, dismissed by the majority below the line, that minds were changed and/or trolls just gave up.

I realised I could trust you guys not to be idiots most of the time. And I realised I loved you for it.

It can be easy to forget how many other open, liberal and progressive everyday people are out there, given the tone used by so many of the self-appointed purveyors of mainstream media news down under. But look at the impressive Guardian Australia comment totals. Now 10% of our global comment – about 60,000 a day – come from Australia. That’s despite the fact Australians account only for about 5% of the global Guardian readership.

You, members of the Guardian Australia commenting community, helped remind me of the humour, warmth, irreverent wit, generosity and compassion to be found in this country. It’s there in abundance if you know where (not) to look. How could I not love you?

Thank you. You helped me find my way home.

• Catherine Burrell worked for the Guardian’s online community team