In my more than 40 years of immersion in ACT newsgathering I cannot remember a single news story about any local UFO sightings. As a columnist always bombarded by readers' reports of the ACT's novelties I always lived in hope of the sorts of juicy newsy UFOisms that are commonplace in the USA. My fingers were always crossed for, say, eye-witness reports of cigar-shaped juggernauts skimming Tuggeranong rooftops. Better still, a columnist lived in hope of a Queanbeyan family's plausible account of how dad had been abducted by aliens but had just been returned, shaken but safe, after being subjected by his weird captors to some invasive procedures. Alas, though, UFOs and aliens seem always to have boycotted Australia in general and the ACT in particular. We don't even have unearthly crop-circles appearing in the fields of the ACT and its region. How are we to explain Canberra's chronic UFOlessness? May it be that aliens find Canberra too boring to bother with? No, that can't be it, for the authoritative Lonely Planet judges that ours is the third most fabulous city in the world. How, then, are we to explain the way in which some nondescript American cities not half so good as Canberra are so popular with aliens? What has UFO-popular Phoenix, Arizona, got that Canberra, ACT hasn't? Even the then governor of Arizona claimed, in 1997, to have seen UFOs in Phoenix skies. One unhappy explanation (for I want to believe) may be that there are no such things as UFOs and aliens and that Canberrans, the most educated of Australians, are too intellectual to believe in sci-fi fancies.

For Australians in general and Canberrans in particular are not very credulous. Meanwhile, our more child-like US cousins, their minds more softened by extreme religion than Australian minds are, are very receptive to myth and magic. If Chief Minister Andrew Barr, our rough equivalent of Arizona's governor, said he believed in UFOs educated Canberrans would scoff about him over their smashed avocado breakfasts. And should a US president simply vanish off the face of the Earth the way our prime minister Harold Holt did 50 years ago this week one knows that alien abduction would loom large in US imaginations as an explanation. Here in Australia, and although most of the theories of Holt's disappearance involved his being whisked away, the imagined whiskerers were always fellow human beings (perhaps Chinese submariners, CIA frogmen or Russian aquanauts) and never aliens. One of my two theories, that the highly susceptible Holt (we know now that he had lovers and that he was at the coast to be with a mistress) was lured away by voluptuous mermaids to their Underwater Kingdom, has never received the forensic investigation it deserves. Only those of us who have been approached by mermaids (the highly-sexed Broulee ones have been the ruin of many a Canberra man) know just how beguiling they can be. My other theory is that poor Holt drowned, that his body was ushered far out to sea by tides and currents and then sank to the seabed, never to be found by people (but only by ravenous crustaceans). And, eerily, this 50th anniversary of the Cheviot Beach horror coincides with my studying (for I am a fresh-faced undergraduate at the University of the Third Age) Shakespeare's play The Tempest. It includes a famous song, Full Fathom Five, about what has become of a drowned man.

Our language brims with words and phrases first minted by Shakespeare and in Full Fathom Five we find the notion of "a sea change". Today we use it to describe notions of dropping out of the rat race and moving to the seaside. But that's not what the Bard means in Full Fathom Five. Five fathoms down, on the seabed, Shakespeare's drowned man's bones have changed to coral. In that lost man's coral skull there are pearls where his eyes once were. Everything about him that was once fleshy and human now "doth suffer a sea-change/Into something rich and strange". That is, surely, what has become of our 17th prime minister.