COLUMN ONE : Uneasy Lies the Crown in Australia : Led by the prime minister, anti-royal rebels want to dump Queen Elizabeth as their sovereign. They say that after centuries of British snubs, they must restore their country’s self-image.

It’s a balmy Sunday, and the gathering of 300 or so revolutionaries in this staid Sydney suburb is hardly the Boston Tea Party. Blue and white balloons festoon the tables. There is Riesling and radicchio.

But up on stage, white-bearded rebel leader Thomas Keneally tells the crowd it’s high time for what some call high treason: He wants to dump Queen Elizabeth II as Australia’s official head of state, like so much tea in the harbor.

“Even if she were Mother Teresa, she’d still have to go,” Keneally, an author who now heads the Australian Republican Movement, explained later.

“We are a society surrounded by Asian nations,” he added. “If we go face them with our primary icon a picture of the British queen, it makes us look like idiots. . . . They look at us and say, ‘Don’t they know she’s 12,000 sodding miles away? Don’t they know she doesn’t give bugger-all for them?’ ”

Lese-majeste is sweeping Australia. It’s led by no less than Prime Minister Paul Keating, who won reelection in March in part by promising to sack the sovereign and change from a constitutional monarchy to a republic by the year 2001, the centenary of federation as an independent nation. More important, opinion polls show a clear majority of voters agree.

Australia’s battle with Britain rages in Parliament and pubs. At least one television talk show ended in a fistfight. Her Majesty, who bears the title Queen of Australia, has yet to join the fray over loyalty to royalty. But die-hard monarchists are charging like the Light Brigade into republican ranks.

“I’d like to see them all charged with treason,” growls Bruce Ruxton, who has tried, unsuccessfully, to do just that. The deputy national president of the Returned Services League, Australia’s chief veterans’ organization, adds a personal note: “I wish I could get the (scoundrels) hanged.”

Barring that, Ruxton pledges that his entire 250,000-member legion of former servicemen will “fight to the last ditch” for the throne. Australia without the Crown, he says, “would need a new coat of arms--two crossed bananas.”

No one has proposed that. But Keating wants to clip the British Union Jack from the top left corner of Australia’s flag and cut the queen from the oath of allegiance. Her tiara-clad head would come off all coins, her gold initials off mailboxes and her coronation picture off ballroom walls.

Keating already has stopped proposing Australians for knighthood and other royal honors. A government report suggests that the British-style armed forces bag bagpipes and kilts, remove royal from regiments and forget Trafalgar Day and the Waterloo Dinner.

Most important, republicans want an Australian head of state. This is one of 15 former British colonies that kept the monarchy after independence. If Australia fires the queen, nearby Papua New Guinea is likely to follow. Canada could get ideas. The House of Windsor, already troubled with taxes, tapped phones and toe-sucking, could have another annus horribilis.

“People no longer openly boast of their British heritage,” said Donald Horne, a historian and pro-republican author. “They used to talk about the Royal Family setting great standards of Victorian morality. Now they actually set a lower standard than the average Australian.”

Rebellion has been rife here almost since the first fleet of British convicts landed in 1788 (partly because the king could no longer rely on the newly independent upstarts across the Atlantic).

In 1807, for example, an Englishman warned that Australia’s six colonies might follow America’s lead. “In 50 years, Australia, that wretched country, could become an unmixed community of ruffians,” wrote James McKintosh, a visiting lawyer. “They will shake off the yoke of England and . . . become a republic of pirates.”

It became, instead, a parliamentary democracy in the British Commonwealth. In theory, the prime minister rules at the queen’s pleasure. Her appointed representative, the governor general, is officially the commander in chief and has the power to call Parliament into session or to dismiss it. In practice, the job is more pomp than circumstance.

But in 1975, the governor general, Sir John Kerr, sparked a battle royal when he dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Labor government because it couldn’t pass a budget. He was the first prime minister sacked by the Crown in 200 years.

Republicans still call it a day of infamy. Keating was then a minister in Whitlam’s government and never forgot the constitutional coup. But he bided his time until the queen visited Australia in February last year.

Not only did Keating decline to bow--nor did his wife, Anita, curtsy--to the visiting monarch. He added insult to injury by giving a pro-republican speech, the first by a prime minister, then publicly put his arm around the royal back. As the news weekly Bulletin later noted, this caused “the poo to hit the punkah” back in Britain.

“Hands Orf Cobber (Buddy),” roared London’s Daily Star, adding: “He slapped his arms around the queen’s waist as if she was a sheila (girl) by the sheep dip.”

Outraged Parliament members at Westminster called their antipodean ally “an utter buffoon” and “an idiot” whose rude violation of protocol could only be explained because he presided over “a country of ex-convicts.”

But then things got nasty. Keating accused Britain of abandoning Australia during World War II, when it was in danger of being overrun by imperial Japan. London retaliated by releasing wartime records that accused Australian troops of being “drunken cowards” during the fall of Singapore and Hong Kong.

All this has tapped deep into the Australian psyche. After all, the most hallowed holiday here, Anzac Day, commemorates a defeat. Each April 25 marks the valiant but disastrous World War I campaign by Australian troops against the Turks at Gallipoli. Many still blame the Poms, as the English are usually called.

Lloyd Waddy, who heads Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, complains that popular films like “Gallipoli” and “Breaker Morant” have not helped the royalist cause. “The real enemies in those films are the British,” the barrister said, his upper lip stiffening. “And those are the great legends of Australia.”

Others anguish over what it means to be Australian. For starters, almost a quarter of the country’s 17.5 million people were born abroad. More than half the recent immigrants come from Asia. Nearly two-thirds of Australian exports go to Asia. Britain, the mother country, is the 19th-largest trading partner.

Royalists say that’s irrelevant. Australia is the sixth-oldest democracy in the world. It’s proud, prosperous and peaceful. “Our system works extremely well,” insists John Howard, a staunch monarchist who is a senior member of the opposition in Parliament. “Why muck it up?”

Military veterans voice stronger sentiments. At the Returned Services League club in the west Sydney suburb of Ashfield, retired army Lt. Alexander James responds to a query on the queen by hoisting his beer and bellowing, “To her majesty, the queen!”

James, 48, an accountant, swears he’ll take his wife and four kids back to Scotland if Australia becomes a republic. Sipping his brew, he warns darkly of “chaos” without the Crown. “I don’t want to see dead bodies on the streets of Sydney. Because that’s going to happen.”

That seems highly unlikely. But breaking up will be hard to do.

A national referendum will be required. Beyond that, the debate has only begun on what kind of political system to adopt and how much it will cost. Keating has named a seven-member commission and asked for options by Sept. 1 on the constitutional changes needed to create “a viable Federal Republic of Australia.”

Most likely is the same parliamentary system, but with a ceremonial president as in Ireland or Austria. Few favor an American-style, directly elected, powerful president. Australia would remain in the Commonwealth, joining 29 other former British possessions that have become republics.

For now, republicans have the momentum.

It’s partly because of Keneally, the 1982 Booker Prize winner for his much-acclaimed “Schindler’s List,” which is being filmed in Poland by Steven Spielberg.

At 57, he is bald and pudgy with a bushy goatee that befits a book jacket. For him, a recent Sunday included a luncheon speech before mostly Italian-born Australians at a soccer club in working-class Bossley Park, an hour’s drive west of Sydney. That night, he debated monarchist Howard at a Jewish community center in Bondi, a trendy district famous for its surfers’ beach.

“I believe an Australian republic is inevitable,” Keneally declared.

Many in the crowd nodded their heads and applauded.

But privately, Keneally is worried. People still like the queen.

“We’ve never had the grievances you blokes had,” he confesses to an American reporter at the bar downstairs. “Elizabeth II isn’t to Australia what George III was to America.”

Australia Fact Sheet

Australia is the world’s smallest continent but the sixth-largest country.

* Population: 17.5 million

* Capital: Canberra

* Language: English, native languages

* Religion: 26% Anglican, 26% Roman Catholic, 24% other Christian

* Ethnic divisions: Anglo: 95% Asian: 4% Aboriginal and other: 1% Source: “The World Factbook, 1992”

The Remains of the British Empire

There are 16 countries, including Australia, that still consider the queen their head of state. They are among 50 other independent nations--once British colonies--that are members of the Commonwealth.

Commonwealth Countries:

Queen is head of state CANADA BRITAIN PAPUA NEW GUINEA AUSTRALIA NEW ZEALAND *

Other Commonwealth countries BELIZE JAMAICA ST. VINCENT & THE GRENADINES GRENADA TUVALU BAHAMAS ST. KITTS & NEVIS ANTIGUA & BARBUDA ST. LUCIA BARBADOS SOLOMON ISLANDS INDIA Source: British Information Services