Craven is a conservative republican and a distinguished professor of law. His theme was the popular triumph of the Queen's diamond jubilee and the need for a - once unimaginable - wary truce between constitutional republicans and monarchists.
Craven and I have been on friendly terms, although attached to different sides of the argument, since the Constitutional Convention in 1998.
I remember as though it were yesterday him privately addressing a gathering of monarchist stalwarts at the convention and telling us that we were like beached whales stranded on the continent's eastern coast, wasting their last breath defending a lost cause and destined to putrefy in very short order.
He has, to a significant degree, changed his mind. There are still subversive references to Prince Charles's ears and Hanoverian chins in Wednesday's piece.
Old habits die hard, I suppose, especially in academe. But, in a way that the republican movement has so far failed to grasp, he has recognised the demographic realities underlying the Windsors' popularity.
"Until now moderate republicans have had only one thing in common with their radical, direct-election siblings. They are prepared to join in a general bagging of the monarchy, on the basis that once we have toppled the corgis, we can start fighting about which republic we actually want.
"The brutal truth is that we are now faced with a quite different contest: one between a substantially resurgent monarchy and a shallow but broad popular instinct for a directly elected head of state, should we become a republic. For the foreseeable future, in this two-horse race, moderate republicanism finishes nowhere.
"What this means is there is no point in conservative republicans further destabilising the monarchy if the only beneficiaries are those who wish to destabilise the constitution.
"Those who love the Constitution but not the Queen must accept that until things change dramatically, if Paris was worth a mass, they must tolerate the throne. A Queen in the hand is less trouble than the Constitution gone bush."
Craven's argument is that a directly elected head of state would be an unequivocal disaster. That person would have an electoral mandate as substantial as, or arguably greater than, the prime minister's and in the fiercely contested politics of modern Australia there would inevitably be a showdown.
Who would sack whom, and what would happen to the economy and good governance while it was sorted out, let alone litigated? The recent political history of France, which has both an elected president and a prime minister, is not very encouraging and suggests that a Westminster-style head of government would always play second fiddle to an elected head of state, who would also inevitably be a politician.
There may be a larrikin streak to Craven but, as those who have listened to the papers he has given to the Sir Samuel Griffith Society's conferences over the years can attest, he has a very elevated view of the Constitution and speaks with feeling about the subtlety and sophistication with which it was framed.
Clyde Cameron used to refer to it disparagingly as a document from the horse-and-buggy days, no doubt because he resented all the checks and balances it provides on executive power and because - as a Whitlam minister - he assumed that the Constitution was essentially an instrument to foil Labor governments.
Suffice it to say that, during the past 12 years, practically none of the journalists or opinion writers who have written dismissively about the Constitution have betrayed even a passing familiarity with the text itself.
Craven describes himself as one who loves the Constitution but not the Queen, and I think it's a credit to him that his veneration for our founding document has persuaded him to make his peace with monarchists and with the crown.
In among the jokes about Sarah Ferguson and the corgis, there are bite-sized chunks of observable reality that his fellow republicans would do well to take on board.
"I know one diamond jubilee does not a counter-revolution make. But the past week has made dedicated republicans turn green, as much with envy as nausea.
"The usual way to dismiss the recent revival of the house of Windsor is to treat it as a royal version of Neighbours. Pretty Kate and plausible Will: good enough for a few episodes but not to carry the series.
"But it is impossible to dismiss jubilee triumphalism in this way. There is - literally - nothing sexy about the Queen. Distressingly, this has been a celebration of duty, honour and fidelity, three grinding virtues previously undiscovered by the Sex and the City generation. Worse, this orgy of reverence seems to be playing in Australia as well as it is in Britain.
"Sure, we are not dumb enough to stand in the London rain for hours waving plastic flags. But when even the ABC reverses a decision not to televise the celebrations, you know that dedicated delusion has exhausted its reserves."
Like his literary critic and essayist brother Peter, Craven has a nice turn of phrase. In future, when thinking about the latest outrage perpetrated by the national broadcaster, I'm sure that phrase about dedicated delusion that has exhausted its reserves will spring to mind.
However, it's his recognition of those three grinding virtues of duty, honour and fidelity that I want to highlight.
While the passionately republican novelist Tom Keneally once thought it would sound clever to describe the Queen as the colostomy bag on the Australian body politic, can any fair-minded observer doubt that she possesses those three virtues abundantly and that they are the reason she is so popular?
Remarkably, in recent years, she has even managed to rehabilitate her office as the supreme governor of the Church of England.
At a time when a learned but singularly implausible Archbishop of Canterbury has presided over doctrinal and institutional chaos, the Queen speaks calmly and with evident sincerity in her Christmas and Easter broadcasts about penitence, grace, sacrificial love and salvation.
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