He arrived, by air, last Thursday "But we had quite a job getting him through Customs," Nick Clark tells us.

But we have been teasing you because this baron is not a flesh and blood nobleman but a life-sized, fibreglass effigy of one. Customs officers were perplexed by him and took three days to admit him to Australia.

He is the first-to-arrive of 25 barons that, later this year, will be arranged around Canberra as part of the commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. Nick Clark, a lawyer, is the Magna Carta Committee's project officer. He was sharing his office with the Baron when he, Clark, spoke to us on Monday. Those are Nick Clark's law books you can see in the photograph behind his, Clark's, hollow but somehow blue-blooded room mate.

"We've nicknamed him 'Fitzy' after Robert Fitzwalter, one of the barons who played a significant role in 1215," Clark explains.

And, for fun and because it is the Australian way, each and every one of the barons will be given the name (and perhaps a nickname too) of one of the powerful men of 1215. Surely Baron Richard de Percy is destined, in Australia to be just another "Dick."

But why are we to have an influx of barons, each arriving bubble-wrapped in a wooden case?

In 1215 the 25 disgruntled barons oversaw, at Runnymede near London, King John's signing of the Magna Carta. The 25 were, in an eerie preview of what has just happened here with the parliamentary Liberal Party's fed upness with a power-crazed leader, determined to curb the rogue King John's powers to make unilateral "captain's pick" decisions about everyone's matters of life and death.

The Magna Carta lay the foundation for the rule of law and the principles of justice which we now enjoy. It curbed the powers of King John. It established fundamental rights and liberties such as the right to a fair trial.

Everything about the Magna Carta is of enormous importance to today's Australian democracy and there will be cerebral symposiums and lectures galore. But Australia's Magna Carta Committee knew that to engage young Australians (famously history averse and with the attention spans of spaniels) something bold and colourful was going to be needed. Magna Carta enthusiasts in the UK have faced the same issue and now we are to adopt their solution to it.

For the UK, an ensemble called Wild in Art imagined 25 model Barons placed all around Salisbury. In imitation of this we are to bring 25 barons to Canberra and to create a Barons' Trail of them for school students to find. Like this first Baron ignominiously held up by Customs, the Barons will arrive (by sea, from Poland) unpainted. The idea it to have them painted by local artists and placed on the Barons' Trail in Canberra.

The Barons will be installed at "strategic points" in Canberra, and we rejoice to report that those strategic points will include not only Parliament House and the High Court but also that most underemployed of fine spaces in the parliamentary triangle, Magna Carta Place. Hands up, readers, if you even know where it is. Yes, just as I thought. Almost none of you. You must get out more.

Nick Clark, rubbing shoulders with the first baron ("We decided to get one in now to show it off") says that the barons are almost life-sized except that they are exceptionally broad across the shoulders. No doubt the original barons were broad-shouldered in every sense. The barons, painted and splendid, will take their places in Canberra in August and will stand around, looking noble for six to eight weeks.

Fitzy, hurried here to be the forthcoming event's poster baron, came by air, but the other 24 are coming together by sea. And when they are all un-bubble-wrapped and are standing around together they will constitute, Clark enlightens, a "thought" of barons for that is the collective noun for a huddle of barons.

When the project is finalised all the details will be at www.magnacarta.org.au which already has a list of all the other events planned to celebrate the 800th Anniversary of Magna Carta this year.

Mention above of the torments being suffered by our despised prime minister reminds us that in recent days the lovely word schadenfreude has been getting a rare gambol in the national conversation. It is the word to describe delight felt when we see long-overdue misfortune befalling someone we feel is a swine who richly deserves it. Last Friday's Gang-gang column opened with the word and some ABC Radio National news and current affairs presenters are gibbering it.

The latter, including and specially the admirable Jonathan Green, are never pronouncing it properly (all Radio National presenters struggle with longish words). It should come out as shah-den-froid-er ("freude" is the German for "joy', the joy give us by Abbott's heartache) but they make it shah-den-Freud.

But this is one of those many instances where mispronunciation actually improves a word's character. Getting it wrong and ending it with Freud embroils the great psychologist in the concept, as if it is a condition (a heartless callousness) discovered and named by him that he saw manifested in his tormented patients.