Many years later, I realised that I had  confused it with a much poorer similar film Demetrius and the Gladiators, a misbegotten sequel to The Robe, and while Jay Robinson’s mad raving Caligula was even less like Menzies, there was something about the timbre of his incessantly shrieking voice that was reminiscent of broadcasts from the proceedings at Parliament House. Now, Menzies himself was eloquent and urbane despite his upbringing as a grocer's son in the Mallee town of Jeparit (which happened to be where all my mob came from), but many of his colleagues were coarse, raucous and unruly. Somehow my brain had twisted all these things together to form my picture of our national leader, and whereas I was wrong about it in every way, hardly anyone at the time would have thought the image unkind.