Age became her. She was a trouper, a survivor, an old pro. In a time of celebrity, hers was the most famous face in the world. She still sold magazines. The Crown made her the reigning monarch of television.
Australians never lost our affection for her. That she was no longer around seemed to make hearts grow a little fonder. She was 85 when she flew here for the last time, climbing very carefully down the steps of her plane, an old lady from London who was our Head of State.
God knows what she was thinking. Waiting on the tarmac in 2011 was a republican governor general, Quentin Bryce, a republican prime minister, Julia Gillard, and half her subjects were telling pollsters they wanted her gone. Qantas flights kept taking off in the background.
1954 was so different. The new Queen was a woman of extraordinary youth and glamour when she arrived in Australia for the first time. No reigning monarch had ever set foot in the country. The tour was a national event, a never-quite-repeated outpouring of affection, loyalty and joy.
I was perched on my father’s shoulders at Farm Cove the morning she stepped ashore. The crowd was immense. I couldn’t see a thing.
After that visit the tide ebbed slowly. Racecourses and hospitals begged to be called Royal. Stockbrokers queued to be knighted. Sir Robert Menzies’ plan to call the new currency the Royal was abandoned only at the last moment. Republicans were ridiculed in the press and ostracised by society.
She came and went for years, performing her few constitutional responsibilities with panache. Prime ministers had her put on a tiara and open parliament. She cut all the big ribbons. It was inconceivable anyone but the Queen would open the Sydney Opera House.
Efforts to make the monarchy more Australian were never convincing. No one took much notice when parliament declared her Queen of Australia in 1973. It was more than a decade before the fine-tuning was done to remove the last confusion between her roles as Queen of this country and that. It’s a constitutional milestone entirely uncelebrated.
In time she learned to pronounce the name of the country (not Or-stralia) but she could do nothing but look and sound who she was. That had its charm. This woman gave Australians a personal link to a romantic version of Britain, a land of castles, pageantry and Shakespeare. A country that won wars.
The magic took a battering in 1975. A Gilbert and Sullivan governor general sacked the prime minister. When the Speaker of the Australian parliament appealed to the Queen to set things right, she backed away.
“Her Majesty, as Queen of Australia, is watching events in Canberra with close interest and attention,” wrote her private secretary, “but it would not be proper for her to intervene in person in matters which are so clearly placed within the jurisdiction of the governor general.”
That was sly. We now know her household toyed with John Kerr for weeks, never blocking his ambitions, only ever cautioning him to move carefully, never insisting he take Gough Whitlam into his confidence. She didn’t stop the ambush and afterwards couldn’t set it right.
Questions that once only troubled constitutional theorists now became part of political discourse: what were her powers and had they really survived in 20th century Australia? How could the British monarch have cooperated in the overthrow of an Australian leader?
The republic became a respectable cause. Support for ditching the Queen crossed party lines. All the rich suburbs turned against the monarchy. Exasperation, ridicule and native pride played their part in this shift – but not contempt for Her.
Over barbecued chops at Balmoral in 1993, Paul Keating told the Queen we would hold a referendum to decide her fate. Her response was impeccable: she would abide by the verdict of the Australian people.
But a new Liberal prime minister, John Howard, was in office by the time the referendum was held in 1999. He was a monarchist with a genius for exploiting division. Australians were – and remain – at loggerheads over the form of a republic. The vote was lost.
The monarchy emerged weakened. The Queen’s supporters had argued she was not really Australia’s head of state, only the nation’s sovereign. They saved her by declaring her irrelevant. And then Howard began the deliberate sidelining of the governors general.
When the Queen was next out here after the referendum, the British press was poised for ugly demonstrations. Of course, there were none. The triumphant outback tours were things of the past. But she was met everywhere by officials, honour guards, schoolchildren and friendly mass indifference.
Oaths were redrafted. Kevin Rudd in 2007 was the first prime minister to pledge his loyalty to his country. His successor Tony Abbott, a monarchist who cut his political teeth in the referendum campaign, pledged his loyalty once more to Her. He took his enthusiasm a little far. Giving the Queen’s consort a knighthood was thought so ridiculous it helped bring Abbott undone.
There were no more visits after 2011. She sent princes instead. Weathering the scandals of her own family earned her fresh respect in Australia in the last decades of her life. She kept calm and hung on for grim life.
Now she has died, Australians are once again faced with the riddle of their own constitutional future. Since 1999 the polite position has been that the next time we address the republic will be when she had gone. That’s now. But no preparations have been made. We are still at square one.
And in Britain they are rolling into place the state theatre no other nation does so well, the great spectacle of funerals and coronations that endow the next monarch with the glamour of the last. That’s how royal houses survive.
So we have another monarch on our hands. They don’t go easily and there’s no sign we will be rid of this one anytime soon.
The Queen is dead. Long live the King.
