Ian Warden | Real men's submarine dreaming

I was arranging flowers in vases at the time, for flower-growing and flower-arranging are major passions of mine and other than going to the ballet, there is nothing I would rather do.

I was reminded by our contrasting enthusiasms (Joe's for lethal submarines, mine for dahlias in vases) of how temperamentally at odds I so often am with members of my gender.

I am following the AUKUS debates very carefully and notice how so many male commentators' voices take on an enthusiastic and swaggering timbre, a blokey rapture, as they discuss the submarines' splendour, their lethality. Real men like weapons.

"They'll [the subs] give Australia greater stealth, greater punching power," another manly man on the same edition of RN Breakfast enthused while I in my girlyness (and standing back so as to better judge whether the bright red dahlias worked or didn't work well in a bottle-green glass vase) entertained the blasphemous thought that perhaps stealth and punching power can be ugly things.

Perhaps, with nothing warrior-like in my nature, I am a disgrace to my sex. I'm reminded of how James Morris, one of my heroes, a sensitive reporter for The Times attached to 1953's "successful" first "conquering" of Mount Everest later confided (in his memoir Conundrum ) that his very strong feminine side made it impossible for him to feel anything worthwhile had been achieved by this conquering. He was unable to share his fellow expeditioners' manly raptures.

Mighty submarines leave me similarly underwhelmed.

Everyone, everywhere is agreeing that AUKUS embeds Australia even more firmly, even more obediently (very like a doting lap dog) in the lap of the USA.

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In the famous feminist cartoon-caricature Waiting For the Perfect Man a cobwebbed skeleton of a long-dead woman is seated on a park bench. Always poignant, in one iteration it is made more poignant still by at her feet the skeleton of her faithful dog, still attached by its imperishable leash to its long-since-perished owner. The late puppy has an everlastingly bright yellow tennis ball in its jaws.

In my dark and despairing imagination, I see my own skeleton (but representing all passionately leftish, USA-wary Australians, worried by how obediently, slavishly Australian governments always join in the ever-belligerent USA's wars and invasions) seated beside her.

I see how both of us, my bony companion and I, have died waiting in vain for a dream to come true, and so are kindred spirits, soul mates even, sharing cobwebs. My skeleton's caption (perhaps it will need to be edited for space) reads something like: "Waiting for someone (Anyone!) on the Federal Labor left to speak up against, even express some doubts about AUKUS, to question our poodle-like loyalty to the USA."

But I must do better. I must man up. And so doing my best after all to try to share manly men's rapt interest in the announced initial "at least three" (and probably four) submarines, I leap into discussion of what nice names to give them.

You can tell a lot about a nation from the names it gives its nuclear submarines. The famously truculent French have given their nuclear ballistic missile submarines bellicose names like Le Triomphant, Le Terrible and Le Temeraire (temeraire means being in a state of reckless rage).

And so I toy with the thought each might have the name of a pretty Australian wildflower. HMAS Billy Buttons? HMAS Christmas Bells? HMAS Bottlebrush? But no, that's still too feminine.

Summoning up some of my scant testosterone, I suggest that in the event of our having an initial four submarines we exhibit Aussie history-consciousness by calling each of them after a member of the four-member Kelly Gang.

The legendary band of brigands was famous for its stealth and punching power, qualities our expert says above are admirable characteristics of nuclear submarines.

In my mind's eye I see whisper-quiet HMAS Ned Kelly leaving its base at Port Kembla, stealing a little way out into the Tasman Sea, amazing some migrating humpback whales whose paths she crosses, for at 110m long and 10m wide she is the biggest humpback cousin they have ever seen.

Then she slithers away out of sight beneath the waves to go about her stealthy business of deterring our foes with her unbelievable lethality.

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