Hollow, cloying veneration greeted the Queen’s death. Now history calls on us to get an Australian head of state | Thomas Keneally

Though Elizabeth II outlasted and undid our republican impulses, it's astonishing to see the nonstop public piety in operation

There is an undeniable power to monarchy. The monarch is an archetype on our collective unconscious, along with the deity, the prophet, Christ figures and the princesses little girls seek stories of, even in the new world of women's power. Kingship is there with all the rest of our psychic paraphernalia. The Anglican church is still locked into believing the late Queen and her monarchy is, holus-bolus, God's will, and will be in the embarrassing situation of having to pretend that the universe and its deity intended every nuance of her life.

The mystique, the voodoo, derives - for my generation - from the surfaces of money, from black-and-white film sequences of her and her sister Margaret (a mythic role-player herself as wild Dionysian princess), and from the freshly minted marriage the young Queen brought all the way to Australia in 1954. These images have a religious force. She was omnipresent.