Indeed, the Constitution which established our nation was Section 1 of a British Act, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act of I900 which was made applicable in Australia by paramount force.

However, it is possible to argue that after Federation, the granting of legislative power to the Commonwealth in Section 51 of our Constitution overrode any particulal Imperial legislation which might otherwise have given rise to inconsistency, Why? Because, under a fundamental legal principle, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act was a later enactment than the Colonial Laws Validity Act and therefore the later statute by implication repealed the earlier one to the extent of any inconsistency. Yet even before our Constitution was passed, the Australian delegates had assured the British Government that the new Australian legislature would still be subject to the Colonial Laws Validity Act.

It had practical implications. For example, in a 1925 case about shipping, the High Court held that provisions of the Commonwealth's Navigation Act of 1912 were invalid through "repugnancy" to the Imperial Merchant Shipping Act of 1894.

A big change came in 1931 when the British passed the Statute of Westminster. This landmark legislation meant British laws would no longer override the laws of colonial legislatures, unless they requested it. It marks the legal shift from the Empire to the Commonwealth of Nations. Countries like Canada and Australia moved from colonial dependency to a new degree of national independence.

However, whereas countries like Canada, South Africa and the Irish Free State had been pushing for legal change, Australia appeared content with the evolving, unwritten convention that the British Parliament would not legislate through Parliament force unless it was asked to do so. This reluctance to push for legal separation from the mother country extended to our approach of the adoption of the Statute of Westmimter, a process which was necessary before the statute would take effect here. Australia didn't adopt it until 1942, at which time we backdated our adoption to 1939. Even the states were still subject to the British Parliarnent, whereas the Canadian provinces, by a specilal provision, were not.

There were High Court uses in the 1970s and 19802 determining whether British laws about merchant shipping overrode state laws. It wasn't until 1986, with the passing of the Australian Act by both the UK and Commonwealth Parliaments, that the States finally became legally independent. The Queen came to Canberra to proclaim this Act which, as Chief Justice Mason of the High Court said in 1992, "marked the end of the legal sovereignty of the Imperial Parliament and recognised that ultimate sovereignty resided in the Australian people".

I don't know about you, but 1986 sounds awfully late in the day for that to become a legal fact. After all, we managed by 1975 to abolish all Appeals to the Privy Council so that the High Court of Australia became the top of our Aussie legal tree. If you want to know more about our long march to legal independence, try my source for this article, Australian Constitutional Law and Thery by Professor Tony Blackshield and George Williams (The Federation Press, 1999, 2nd edition).

Will we vote "yes" for the republic tomorrow? All the Polls have us looking to Britain again, tugging our forelock as we take lollypop steps towards completion of our separation. Do you remember those tiny steps from childhood? We're taking them still. God help us! When will we ever achieve what the Yanks call "closure"? It's time we left home.

I've been actively resisting getting swept up in the big focus on the end of the millennium. I plan to spend New Years Eve quietly, at home. Not because I fear the Y2K menace may leave me trapped in a lift. I just prefer to avoid the pressure to get profound in big groups about the beginning of a new era.

But it must be finally getting to me, because ever since Mum mentioned the gas lights going out, I keep seeing it in my mind's eye. Little things remind me of it. I work in a TV studio a couple of nights a week and when the lighting operator uses a big metal pole to reach up and adjust the studio lights over my head, I find myself thinking of Mum as a tiny girl, looking up and watching the naked flame go out.

Despite my millennium resistance, the astonishing rate of change in this century is making me wonder what I'll live to see that I never could have anticipated, it seems anything is possible.

Years ago I worked as a trainee psychiatric nurse. An elderly man once told me about his experiences as a patient during World War II in Callan Park, now Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital in Sydney. Since the war, modern psychiatric medication has reduced some of the really gross symptoms of psychosis. But in the days when alcoholics could spend years locked up with patients who were mentally ill, this man shared over-crowded wards with some very disturbed people.

Many years later, when he was off the grog and I was working for the ABC, we returned to the old sandstone wards, now a college of the arts, and I recorded an interview. He told me about "the repetition day after day of listening to a man who thought he was a cockatoo and another, a dog, actually barking like a dog and talking like a cocky". He also described his personal experience of wearing canvas camisoles as a form of restraint, and receiving electric shock treatment, before the use of muscle relaxants, as attendants held him down.

Fortunately most memories are far less confronting. My Mum once had a job counting huge piles of copper pennies collected from the old black public telephones and wrapping them in brown paper for the Post Office. I can remember the milk being delivered, when I was a little girl, by a mana with a horse and cart. I can hear the big old horse as he slowly clip-clops along, pulling the cart as the delivery man runs in and out of yards depositing the milk.

I think I can even remember when a man delivered blocks of ice to put in ice chests before electric fridges. But is that possible? I'm only 45. When I remember the big double-sided hook that the ice man used to pick up the blocks, am I just remembering what I have been told by my older relatives? Memory is a tricky business, as Marcel Proust made clear in the volumes of the masterpiece he wrote between 1913 and 1927, Remembrance of Things Past. This famous literary journey began with Proust's description of how the taste of a tiny tea cake dipped in his cup caused a chain reaction of memories. He remembered how his Aunt used to give him just such a cake - "And suddenly the memory revealed itself."

This exploration of memory through the daily lives of the French aristocracy has never really touched me much. Our Aussie poet Judith Wright captured the power of ever present memories much more powerfully for me in her famous poem Bora Ring. A modern hunter passes the site of past Aboriginal gatherings in the bush - "The hunter is gone; the spear/is splintered underground, the painted bodies/a dream the world breath; sleeping and forgot." As he rides away his heart "halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word/that fastens in the blood the ancient curse,/ the fear as old as Cain."

Memories floatjust below the surface of our everyday lives, occasionally thrusting up to break the secure membrane of the present and leave us inexplicably disconnected.

Evidently St Maria died when very young, the result of not doing what a bad boy wanted her to do. To this day, my friend is still unsure what that boy wanted St Maria to do. Or why she had to die for refusing him. But she can remember the nuns praising the little girl's resistance. They even sold relics at the school. Entrepreneurial sisters marketed single threads of the frock worn by St Maria when she said "No" to Aussie schoolgirls in the mid-1960s.

The market for inspirational tales goes back a long way. In 1405 Christine de Pizan, an Italian-born widow living in France wrote a history of the world called The Book of the City of Ladies. I'm told by my source in the History Department at the University of Melbourne, Avril Hannah-Jones, that this oddly flamed work celebrated the contribution of women to science, the arts and government. De Pizan had been forced to support herself and her family after the death of her husband, and she did so through copying manuscripts and writing poetry and books.

If there's a girl in your life you'd like to inspire, Susan Geason's Great Australian Girls (ABC Books, due out next month) offers plenty of ideas about how to live a life bravely. The author is a graduate in history and politics from Australian and Canadian universities and it shows. She's come up with some great research on historical figures like the writer Ethel (Henry Handel) Richardson, whose tough childhood with a spooky Dad inspired some of her best-known works, like Myself When Young and The Getting of Wisdom. Geason has also written five mystery novels and worked in the newspaper industry, so she delivers a pacy read.

Try this for a life. At age 14, Mary Reiby survived destitution and the threat of a life in service by cross-dressing and hitting the road in 18th-century England. She escaped hanging for horse stealing, and a further period of cross-dressing in gaol, only to face transportaiion to Sydney. Here, she experienced the humiliation of being paraded on arrival at the dock, like all fernale convicts, before a crowd of soldiers and settlers who were allowed to choose a "wife" to take home.

She'still only 16 at this, point and there's a lot more to tell before she dies at 78, a wealthy businesswoman who'd outlived a much-loved husband and five of her own children. There are seven Sydney streets named after her, but it doesn't seem enough to mark such an extraordinary life.

Every girl in this book is an Australian who showed guts in her early years and then went on to be a remarkable woman. The pianist Tamara Anna Cislowska played the Sydney Town Hall at age three. Monique Truong courageously survived a kidnapping at 11.

Country girl Heather Tetu spent nine years with the children's Flying Fruit Fly, Circus as an acrobat and trapeze artist. After a horrific fall, she faced a painful recovery process with such courage that she arrived at her wedding hanging from a trapeze. (This image provides one of the best of many startling photographs in the book). There's even a Catholic story about the girl who many believe will be Australia's first saint, Mary MacKillop. Mary had your average saint's childhood - a vision of the Virgin at eight and the dedication of her life to the poor, sick and homeless by nine. She went on to found the first Australian order of nuns a t 24. Frankly, this Aussle saint's claim to fame seems a whole lot more socially useful than saying "No" to a bad boy - and then dropping dead.

A Great Aussie Girl Website will be launched with the book. Go to wwww.susangeason.com and you'll find the way. Geason says she's got a file bulging with research about great Aussie boys which she may develop into an interactive website one day. If she does, I'll double click.

The idea that such characteristics are rare tell us a lot about the people who get covage in our media. But it has little to do with what is going on in our nation. We may not see qualities of decency and sacrifice very often in our public figures, but you've only got to open your eyes, to see them in abundance in the community at large.

Last weekend I attended the fourth Victorian conference for carers of people with mental illness. Listening to the experiences of ordinary people confronted with extraordinary and unpredictable challenges, I kept thinking of the qualities that make Cosgrove so appealing, and how the same qualities were to be found among these people as well.

I vividly remember the first interview I saw with Cosgrove, before his departure for East Timor. He was so impressive. For me, it was the raw masculinity of his physical presence combined with a measured, articulate rationality. He came across as someone who knew what he was talking about and capable of the toughness that leadership requires. Yet one also sensed a capacity for strong feelings, particularly compassion. This combination of strength and emotional intensity was immensely appealing.

I saw these qualities again at the carers' conference when George, a businessman whose son has a mental illness, spoke to the 480 participants from all over Australia. George had been asked to discuss how he found the strength to keep caring for a son who is sometimes aggresive and difficult and yet relies upon his family in this deinstitutionalised era, for comprehensive and vital support.

Like Cosgrove, George was a big, strong man who would not look out of place in the front row at a rugby game. As he discussed the importance of accepting that the person you love has an illness and of learning as much about that illness as possible, I was struck again by the power of hearing big Aussie blokes talk with passionate intensity.

It is immensely difficult to draw men into the support services designed to help families cope with the trauma of long-term caring. It is well documented that many marriages brek down when a child has a significmit disability. Too often women are left to care alone. So it is rare and refreshing to hear a man like George talk about how hard it is for fathers to accept that they cannot "fix" a mental illness. As he spoke, women and men around the room wiped tears from their cheeks with stoic embarassment. George admitted that he had initially left too much of the burden of care to his wife and put too much pressure on his son by trying to fix a problem that required more complex responses. He has learned "to support his son in his best endeavours" with a very different set of expectations. He lamented the fact that so few men fro nted up to the community groups and services that made up the fragile safety net essential for his son's survivial. George clearly yearns for male camaraderie as he strives to "d o the right thing" by his wife, his son and the community at large.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in Canberra estimates that carers like George and his wife make a contribution worth $16.63 billion to our community And this network of support plays a vital preventitive role as well. Associate professor Isaac Schweitzer, director of the moods disorder unit at The Melbourne Clinic, told the conference that the World Health Organisation predicts depression will soon be the major cause of disability world wide. And the highest risk factor for recurrig depression is a lack of perceived social support. Let's give more recognition to courageous carers, as well as to brave warriors.