One of our grand national delusions is that we are a stoic people, unflinching in the jaws of hardship and disaster, unique in all the world. Knock us down and we dig into bottomless reserves of character to dust ourselves off and get back at it. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi.

It's a myth, of course. We enjoy a good whinge as much as anybody, and it's high time to recognise this. I'm thinking of instituting a round of awards for exemplary complaining, with a gala presentation night for the Gold Whinger of the Year.

Already there are standout candidates. Let's hear it for our billionaire mining magnates, the likes of Andrew ''Twiggy'' Forrest, Clive Palmer and Australia's richest woman, Gina Rinehart. Their howls of pain at the prospect of the federal government's new mining tax were wondrous to behold.

Neck and neck with them come the bosses of the big four banks, led by Westpac's Gail Kelly and the ANZ's Mike Smith, who want you to believe that, contrary to ill-informed public opinion, the milk of human kindness runs richly through their veins.

Interest rate gouging? Price signalling? Collusion in the banking business? Perish the thought.

Just a few weeks ago there was a gaggle of women playwrights bitching - if that's the word - that they couldn't get their stuff produced because theatre companies were biased towards men. But it's not quality that counts, it's quotas.

''Any theatre company that receives public funding should be compelled to report annually on their gender representation in their program and processes that they are pursuing to achieve equity,'' said one of these drama queens. With dialogue like that ...

It will take a mighty effort, though, to beat the retail tsars Gerry Harvey and Solly Lew grizzling about wickedly unpatriotic customers deserting them to buy stuff at half price on the internet. Poor Gerry, down to his last 50 racehorses and old Solly, no doubt wondering where he'll find $700,000 for his next Rolls-Royce. It would melt a heart of stone.

Then there's Tony Abbott and his Nark-in-Chief, Andrew Robb. Looks like a vintage year. Reader nominations welcome.

A few people had a good whinge about Michael Parkinson delivering this year's Australia Day address at the Opera House. First time a foreigner, let alone an Englishman, had ever done it. Colonial cringe and all that. It didn't bother me.

You might think that inconsistent, given my savaging here last week of another English writer, Giles Coren, who had offered us a free character reading after England's Ashes win. The significant difference is that Coren is an uncouth ignoramus striving to be noticed. Parkinson is not.

He and his wife, Mary, have been visiting this country for as long as I can remember. They come for the cricket, stay for the summer, and catch up with the friends they have gathered over the years.

In short, they like the joint and us. So much so that the garden of their riverside home on the Thames, west of London, boasts a dinkum gum tree. Not something you see a lot in England's green and pleasant land.

''Are you supposed to prune them?'' Michael once asked me. ''No,'' I said unhelpfully. Mary told me this week that the thing now towers over the surrounding countryside.

The Parkinson speech made the sound, if unremarkable point, that Australia will eventually become a republic, after the death of the current monarch. This inflamed the royalist grovellers, among them the inevitable Professor David Flint, who called the speech ''a stunt''.

''The Queen is of course Australian,'' he huffed, barmy as ever. No, she's not. If Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor or any of her offspring were to apply for an Australian passport they wouldn't clear the first hurdle.

Grey with age, burdened with care, weary of the ways of the world, I notch up my 65th birthday on Monday. A bit of a bugger, that, although I guess getting there is better than not. This year is a biggie for the first of us postwar baby boomers, the 1946 lot. A milestone looms. When 65 ticks over you are on the uphill trudge to 70, an age that once seemed unreachably distant and whiskery.

On the plus side, I find, at last, that I am simplifying my life. I haven't the slightest interest in being on Facebook or owning any sort of iThing, and I don't need a mobile phone that can shoot feature movies and perform open heart surgery. Last year I tried twittering, or whatever it's called, but found it so numbingly banal that I gave it away after a couple of weeks. The trick is to grow old disgracefully but discreetly. A few summers ago, when I was still on radio, I blonded my hair, hoping to shock my adult children. I hadn't anticipated infuriating The Daily Telegraph so much that they sent a photographer to snap me. Odd, I thought, when that very same year their elderly proprietor's thinning locks ranged in hue from a glowing autumnal russet to a rich aubergine, but they must have missed that.

Another media titan and world leader is my current role model. Silvio Berlusconi is an inspiration to us all. Not to look at. I'd guess his face has had a bit of work; it has all the lively humanity of a chunk of ciabatta. But the parties, oh the fleshy bacchanalia, at his villa.

Bunga bunga parties they're known as; carnal affairs of ''topless showgirls gyrating around poles, models dressed as nurses and policewomen stripping off their kinky costumes, and women rubbing themselves up against the 74-year-old Prime Minister and his aged cronies,'' as we learnt earlier this week. It sounds frightfully like Salo, Pier Paolo Pasolini's much-banned movie about lust and damnation in Fascist Italy, circa 1944.

With Silvio as our beacon, there's hope for us baby boomers yet. Although my kids or, for that matter, my wife, might not take well to such cavorting. ''Remember, Dad,'' my first-born son warned me the other day. ''We get to choose your nursing home.''

Mike Carlton