Friday/Anzac Day at the Australian War Memorial during the mid-morning ceremony was especially fascinating this year because two sorts of folk rocked up with two different aspirations. Scarcely 200 metres from the centre of the main ceremony, the Stone of Remembrance, people who had come not for the service but to see the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge began assembling around a fenced-in patch of grass about the size of two tennis courts. This was where, those there from 8am onwards (including a pre-pubescent girl wearing a tiara) told me, for I too had arrived early, the Duke and Duchess were going to plant the tree.
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As the morning wore on, the fact of there being two congregations at two different War Memorial venues seemed increasingly odd. Trying to attend to both (and so, like hundreds of others, missing out on a worthwhile possie at the main ceremony), I joined the crowd across from the tree-planting venue in a lush meadow in front of a huge screen giving the best view in the house, really, of what was going on at the main ceremony.
This was a godsend for lots of folk, including people like a very disappointed, and very bemedalled ''Peter'' (we shared a park bench) who had come with his wife all the way from Albury-Wodonga only to find the crowds were too large and his medals not sufficient to earn him a seat at the main event. How could this be, this columnist fumed inwardly, when I had just seen mere simpering TV ''personalities'' from mindless breakfast shows being ushered into prime places close to the Stone. Life is unfair.
But there were consolations about being in front of the screen. Apart from the fine pictures, there was an Aussie informality about our congregation because, for example, lots of people had been able to bring their dogs and some felt able to smoke. Children romped. A thoughtfully placed marquee dispensed fine coffee to our working-class congregation at working-class prices.
It felt so good to be there in such company that not even the commemorative address by a gigantically enlarged on-screen prime minister (his hair growing eerily darker with each Anzac Day), which I had dreaded, caused the distress I was braced for. I had expected far more jingoism and Boys Own nonsense than there turned out to be in practice.
Nearby, the extreme royalists bunched oblivious around the tree-planting site. The strains of the hymn O Valiant Hearts, so full of thumping lies but so tear-makingly poignant, ricocheted off them. They weren't there to think about war or the gallant dead.
At the National Portrait Gallery and then at the tree-planting venue at the War Memorial, this reporter again and again heard young women, young mothers, gasping of the Duchess of Cambridge, ''Isn't she gorgeous! Isn't she lovely!'' when to impressionable heterosexual old me, they, the young commoners, seemed at least as lovely and gorgeous as the duchess they thought supernaturally lovelier than themselves. Their babies, too, seemed every bit as cute as the very cute Prince George that royalist Australians somehow imagine is magically, specially and Christ-child cute.
Interviewing several of these mesmerised sheilas, and trying to find out more about their enthusiasm for Kate, they would often say something like ''She's so natural, she's so sincere, she's so personable,'' when, from my conversations with these women they too seemed utterly natural, sincere and personable. I felt sure that if there were some sort of device, a kind of Naturalometer, a Sincerityometer, you could point at people to measure their naturalness and sincerity, their readings would have been as wonderful as Kate's, perfect 10s on a 10-point scale. In matters of naturalness, the young commoners, showing up in jeans and any old garment, and not appearing to have spent much time in front of the mirror, may even have edged out the lovely duchess (always fabulously and expensively dressed, and painstakingly cosmetically enhanced around the eyes) on the Naturalometer.
People's illusions about what they think they see when they look at royal persons remind me of how dear old Malcolm Muggeridge, badly deluded by late-blooming Catholicism, used to spend a lot of time around Mother Teresa and was convinced he could see her giving off a special glow, a unique aura, a heavenly radiation not given off by anyone else.
Australian royalists, too, suffer from this Muggeridge Syndrome when they behold Kate and Wills. As for me, I did but see them passing by and yet will feel indifferent to them till I die.
Hankering for Australia to become a republic is, for some of us, a matter of putting away the idea that average Australians are somehow inferior to average members of an average (but celebrity) British family. It is freaky to watch Australians, usually so sensible, reduced to ecstatic blancmange by the presence of them (royalty) or of anyone just as human as themselves. When and if we dispense with the monarchy and achieve Australian heads of state we will at least be able to remain healthily emotionally lukewarm and sane when we see them, think about them and talk about them. We won't drool. We won't shrill ''We love you!'' to them in the un-Australian way so many in recent days have shrilled to the not-divine but-merely very personable duke and duchess.
