Manly heroes are all very well (men like Spartacus, Biggles, Buffalo Bill, Edmund Hillary, Bear Grylls and Scott Morrison). Yet I have a developed feminine side that leaves me a little underwhelmed by blokey achievements.

So for example I don't see what of any worth or importance was achieved by Hillary being the first person to climb Everest. Why not, my inner woman wonders, leave the dear mountain alone, admiring and respecting it (perhaps writing shy poems about it) from a distance? Generally, heroines' achievements seem, though often less showy than men's, more substantial, more profound, less silly.

One under-discussed feature of these awful times is that we have few, if any, true heroes and heroines to worship. Evolutionary psychologists diagnose that we have evolved to need to have admirable people to admire, people whose examples lift the cultural/survival standards of the tribe.

The above musings have been triggered in me by an event of recent days. Are you sitting expectantly? Then I'll begin.

Something in me (a kind of spasm-pang of love and admiration) went "plung!" when, last week, news came of the retirement from tennis of Maria Sharapova. Watching and hearing her play (hearing her because on court she was famously, exhilaratingly noisy) was one of the great joys of my many years as a journalist deployed to haunt the dizzying fortnight of the Australian Open tennis tournament.

First, to explain my "plung!" of emotion. "Plung!" is the resonant, musical sound a tennis ball used to make in the olden days when tennis racquets were made of wood and were strung with thick gut strings made from the intestines of animals, hopefully not of endangered species. "Plung!" is one of the lost sounds of civilisation.

There is a grand John Betjeman poem, The Olympic Girl, in which the nondescript poet describes his hopeless crush on a goddess. I never saw Sharapova (almost six foot two, 188cms, and an utter goddess) up close in the press/player corridors at Melbourne Park without thinking of Betjeman's poem. Here is a fillet from it.

The sort of girl I like to see

Smiles down from her great height at me.

She stands in strong, athletic pose

And wrinkles her retrousse nose.

Oh! would I were her racquet press'd

With hard excitement to her breast

And swished into the sunlit air

Arm-high above her tousled hair,

And banged against the bounding ball

"Oh! Plung!" my tautened strings would call,

"Oh! Plung! my darling, break my strings

For you I will do brilliant things.

And of course as Betjeman knew, "plung!" is somehow just the sort of sound a throbbing heart makes when one is hopelessly in love.

I admired Sharapova enormously. Impressive as she was on a tennis court (I had never seen competitive hunger like it) some of my best memories of her are of the ways in which at post-match press conferences she would take no crap from boring old fart tennis journos old enough to be her uncles (she was only 16 when she played her first Australian Open) who only wanted to ask her questions about her tennis clothes and her famous on-court vocalisings.

"Did any of you actually notice that I just took part in quite a demanding, exciting actual tennis match out there?" she would seethe, witheringly, back to the farts.

I loved it when she did that, scoffing at the trivia of the old farts' preoccupations, insisting that she be taken seriously as an athlete.

And I loved her on-court vocalisings. At their powerful best they were her aggressive female athlete's war cries. Surely courageous Queen Boadicea, leading her warriors into battle against the vile Romans, emitted war cries just like Sharapova's.

People who deplored her noisiness were sexist fogeys who believed female tennis players ought to be ladylike and decorative - seen but not heard.

Assertive, strong, and very, very accomplished (this was not someone who was just famous for being famous but the winner of 36 WTA singles titles including five Grand Slams) she ignored the worm-like fogeys and raged on.

It was a privilege to watch and hear her in her heyday, to be there when her voice rattled the rafters of the Rod Laver Arena.

She, Jacinda Ardern and Greta Thunberg are the sorts of women who make my heart go "plung!" with rapt admiration.