Everyone has said it by now, but this changed and confusing world makes it all the more extraordinary. It seemed as though she had always been there, been part of the furniture of our minds, if no more, and although we knew she could not go on getting older and older forever, if anyone seemed immortal it was she, Queen Elizabeth II. For people of a certain age there was a sense that as long as she was there the world was still the one they grew up in. Now she is gone.

Three generations of Australians have been born or died not knowing any other monarch. People who are now elderly have memories of royal visits when they were young, of watching the graceful royal yacht Britannia sail to her berth, of crowds in cities and country towns cheering as the young Queen and her handsome husband drove by waving, of being lined up as schoolchildren in elaborate formations with bossy teachers blowing whistles and pushing everyone into place to spell out ‘Welcome’. Her later visits, by plane instead of ship, were watched more on television than in the streets, but still enthusiastically received – by none more so than the Labor and republican politicians scrambling to get a place of honour beside the royal personages.

One shadow hung over the latter years of her reign: the prospect that this remarkable woman would be succeeded by her less than remarkable oldest son.

Charles’s problem, which was also what brought his first royal namesake low, is that he is an interferer. He takes sides on political issues which a constitutional monarch should never do. The most egregious example is climate, where he has long invited ridicule with his periodic predictions of apocalypse round the corner, and when it doesn’t arrive just stretching out the deadline a few years. If as King Charles III he goes on meddling in contentious matters the accumulated capital of popularity inherited from his mother could be dissipated.

But Charles is 73, so perhaps he will not be on the throne long enough to do much damage. Or perhaps he won’t do any. Kingship may change his whole character. Moreover in his Queen Consort he has an eminently sensible wife. It was presumably the good influence she knew that Camilla would have on Charles that persuaded Queen Elizabeth to stipulate that Camilla should in due course officially be Queen Consort instead of being kept in the background as a kind of mute appendage to her husband.

And if in the death of Elizabeth we have lost the continuity of the longest reign in British history, of the same head of the Commonwealth for over seven decades, through crises internal and external, a certain continuity is represented by King Charles. He too seems always to have been there, never out of the news, through his years at school in Australia, his ‘fairy tale’ marriage and its unedifying and embarrassing deterioration and collapse. He was excoriated after the death of Diana, but regained a measure of public affection with his marriage to Camilla, whom he should have married in the first place. Lately he has become portly and avuncular, like his great-great-grandfather Edward VII, who was also considered a risk to the monarchy but became an exemplary and fondly regarded king.

The risk to the monarchy in our time and our country is more clearly defined. As the Queen grew older Australian republicans were champing at the bit to be of rid her. They fell short of publicly wishing for her demise, but you knew they were thinking with satisfaction that the day must be just around the corner when they could foist on the nation the republic that politicians want more than voters. They’re at it now, just watch. Albanese and his ‘minister for the republic’ will permit themselves a few crocodile tears for the Queen, before using her death as a pretext to present the abolition of the monarchy in Australia as the logical next stage in our historical evolution. The mantras ‘we have come of age’, ‘we are diverse and no longer Anglo’ will be trumpeted by governments and media so that Australians who favour the monarchy, and are happy with its constitutional function, can be sneered at as ‘out of touch’ and ‘unpatriotic’. It won’t matter that patriotism is a sin to the Left. Anything goes in the cause of the republic.

Never mind too that the cult of the republic is the cult of mediocrity. Republicans want to dismantle a time-tested arrangement that works well and keeps us part of an international family of like-minded nations and to replace it with extended rule by our not spectacularly gifted politicians, and with a figurehead president who is either one of themselves or the kind of person who gets chosen as Australian of the Year.

Labor and the Left in general will now be like greedy kids trying to decide which to eat first at a birthday party – the ice cream or the cake. Just think, two excuses for picking apart the constitution – the monarchy and the ‘Voice’. Which gets the priority?

Among the tributes to the Queen we fail to hear any from one of the normally most vocal sectors of our national life, the feminist sisterhood. Don’t they recognise, in an age when ‘women’s leadership’ is so assiduously promoted by the media, the qualities and dedication Queen Elizabeth showed?

Why do I even bother asking? It’s not women feminists care about. It’s leftist feminist women. But women who are proud to be women, and men who truly respect women, will know that in Elizabeth II all the feminine virtues were abundantly present, and in small ways or great were an inspiration to her subjects.