THE PRINCIPAL ARGUMENT advanced in the current campaign for a change to a republic is that the head of state should be Australian; constitutional monarchists reply that we already have an Australian head of state in the governorgeneral. A hitherto overlooked High Court decision provides the key to the resolution of this dispute. This campaign is the fourth significant attempt to create an Australian republic. The first was to establish a white racist republic in the nineteenth century, free of the immigration policy of the British empire. This faded away with the movement to Federation, with the Commonwealth of Australia…