What revolutions we Australians have watched in what Doctor Johnson would have called “publick manners”. Does this reflect some significant change in the deeper reality of human personality so that, deep down, we feel differently about our neighbour? Or are manners simply the trivial froth floating on life’s surface, mere fads and fashions drifting this way and that from year to year, startling in their variety, but not really worth our serious attention? Certainly the changes have been spectacular. Women’s skirts moved steadily upward from below the knee towards the now barely sub-perineal. Look at one of those well-covered-up beach…