I can remember the death of King George VI, father of our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II, who is, in case anybody has failed to notice, about to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee, the 60th anniversary of her coronation.
On the morning of 6 February 1952, I went to the breakfast table, where my father was reading The Sun. He always started with the back page, for the important sports news: this was just the natural way a red-blooded Aussie male read the paper way back then.
The mandatory silence brooded over the breakfast table, but I was just old enough to read, and knew a screaming headline when I saw one. THE KING IS DEAD: the letters were the biggest I had ever seen.
At the start of the official period of mourning the police wore black arm bands, flags were flown at half-mast, and public functions, including school assemblies, started with one minute's silence. And it took everybody quite a while to get used to the necessary gender change in what was then Australia's national anthem.
Sixteen months later the mood was much lighter, and we had moved to a country township in the Wimmera district of Victoria. The Powers, whoever they were, decreed that coronation celebrations had to take place.
So take place they did. Great were the preparations, many were the rehearsals, and primal scenes of rivalry erupted with monotonous regularity as those same Powers decided which children should do what in the display at the local football ground.
I was wildly jealous of my sister. She was to wear full Scottish kit while riding a float that bore scenes from British history, while I was condemned to being a foot-slogger: it was a big come-down from playing a fairy in the Bendigo centenary celebrations two years before.
I am still in touch with three of my Wimmera classmates from all those decades ago. When I contacted them, one recalled wearing a red cape made out of crepe paper, the second wore blue, but the third, like me, had to make do with a lousy old white sheet that our mothers thought they could part with. And white was a relative term in the days of blue bags and before the invention of White King, speaking of royalty.
Picture the scene on 3 June 1953: children, graded as to height, and in their separate coloured rows,