The governor-general's power is not the only currency in statecraft. People yearn for standards, values and role models. They need public symbols of private rectitude. Hence, the resignation letter's reference to 'the importance, dignity and integrity of this high office'.

Protocol sits lightly in Yarralumla, the governor-general's residence in Canberra, but it is there. When I called on an earlier resident, the scholarly Sir Zelman Cowan, with academic and media connections, his aide-de-camp fussed because I was accompanied by my friend, Ian Matthews, then editor of The Canberra Times. Grudgingly letting Ian in, he warned: 'I'm afraid you won't be in the Viceregal!' The court circular that the newspapers published mentioned only me.

The very name viceregal is a telling reminder of the governor-general's semi-royal status. When Ian shook hands with Sir Zelman, he bobbed his head, the male equivalent of the curtsy due to royalty. Current theology says none of this matters to a matter-of-fact monarchy. That might be true of Prince Charles and his sons, but the House of Windsor has always been punctilious about style and status. On the eve of India's independence, British prime minister Clement Attlee proposed that King George VI, who would soon cease to be Emperor of India, should become president of India or be given a title 'from India's heroic age'.

Apparently, these ideas emanated from the king himself, who felt keenly the lost durbar, the grand levee in Delhi at which his father and grandfather had received the homage of bejewelled Indian princes. His great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, called herself Kaiser-i-Hind.

When I was covering Prince Charles' investiture as Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle, a stately English matron in hat, long gloves, twin set and pearls told me sternly: 'I don't care what you say, but royal occasions haven't been the same since those dear maharajahs stopped coming!'

The Commonwealth, of which Australia is a key member, enshrines imperial memory. Malcolm Muggeridge, the iconoclastic British writer, scathingly called it 'a holding company set up to dispose of dwindling assets, on whose managerial board the queen does not sit, though she has inherited a sizeable block of non-voting shares'.

By all accounts, she takes her inheritance seriously enough to guarantee the Commonwealth secretariat's occupancy of Marlborough House, her grandmother's old home. She likes to think of the monarchy as multiracial, and encourages Afro-Asian envoys to present their credentials in traditional attire.

None of this need constrict Australia. But in spite of a 55 per cent referendum vote in favour of the monarchy, Australians still dither over whether to sing God Save the Queen or Australia Fair on formal occasions, who to toast at ceremonial dinners and whether to bend the knee as Mr Howard's wife did, but the wife of his predecessor, Paul Keating, did not.

More than disrespect to the queen, confusion affects Australia's self-perception. How should the head of state be appointed? What role should the office fulfil? And, in light of recent events, how should a controversial head of state be removed?

The questions must be answered if Australia is to establish a viable identity that is taken seriously.

A notional dominion like Canada would be all right if the monarch and her representative are accepted and honoured. If not, Australians should take the republican road. To adapt Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell, it is this shilly-shallying that is absurd.

Sunanda Kisor Datta-Ray is a senior fellow at the School of Communication and Information of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore