“Friends, humans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.”

That’s a scurrilous distortion of what Mark Antony actually meant but I couldn’t help myself.

Our old Prime Minister, ever the cricket tragic, with one eye on the history books, strode purposefully to the crease for the last time and just like his hero Don Bradman, got out for a duck.

There will of course, in the Aussie spirit of not kicking a man when he’s down, be reams of tributes to John Howard so I won’t bother with any here.

The era we leave behind is the musty one you discover in those old cushions used to put our feet on as we sat, relaxed and comfortable, in front of the old narrow black and white telly. The insides of the cushion were most likely stuffed with ancient copies of Australian Women’s Weekly, printed on shiny paper in bright unnatural colours.

You won’t find many examples of gravure printing these days. More suited to colour pictures than text, expensive to set up but able to fang along at great speed, the gravure printing process was in its prime when the women’s magazines sold millions of copies each month.

Ah, the nostalgia. In those days the rich, the famous and the stylish would be copied for what they wore in public, rather than what they didn’t wear.

More often than not there was another crusty old relic on the cover. I speak with no less reverence of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. She’s sovereign to the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Saint Kitts, Nevis and of course, Australia.

Now that the royalist shadow of Sir Robert Menzies is cast less strongly on the Liberal Party, we might at last have bipartisan support for a republic.

Yes, the parting of the ways between Australia and the royal family of Great Britain is mainly symbolic, but that is the point. It’s time to grow up.

Queen Elizabeth, God bless her, is a lovely old lady but some of her children and grandchildren are blithering idiots. We can’t just wait around for the day when Prince Charlie’s head pops up on the coins and the five-dollar note.

Here is a man who was caught by eavesdroppers, while still married to Diana, talking on his mobile phone to his girlfriend and telling her he’d like to live in her underpants.

I’m sorry, but I don’t want his head in my pocket.

How about this for an idea? We’ll drift slowly towards republicanism so nobody gets alarmed. Stage one is to reclaim our money. We could have an award for the greatest achievement in tackling climate change or in fixing the landscape.

The winner each year would get his or her head on our coins for that year. Maybe each five years we could vote for ‘Face on the Fiver’ and that way we would have a lasting record of who was held in esteem as a great individual Australian during that time.

Let’s at least do something before we end up in a right royal mess.