Charles III has rather selflessly come to see you, Australians. Your Sovereign. Of whom we are all subjects.
Subjects. If you don’t like that word then you can change it in the constitution. Probably best to wait for him to go home first. Because he didn’t ask for that, and may be a bit embarrassed if you make a fuss about it.
And the sad thing is you can see in his face, as you couldn’t see in his mother’s – a very engaging assertion of blamelessness. He has so often had to bear that demeanour. He is, as the late queen never was, frankly a fellow pilgrim of ours, and we all hope even if he doesn’t have to pack his own bags that his pilgrimage to the Antipodes leaves him in good health.
And as for blamelessness, well, he is blameless. He is not the adversary of an Australian republic. It is the enduring affection for the monarchy, particularly but not only in ageing Australians, that keeps the Australian monarchy alive. As adversaries, they dished us squarely in the referendum of 1999. I would be a bad sport not to say, “Good on ‘em”. As for Charles, he has correctly and genially said it is up to us to settle the issue.
This human demeanour of King Charles and Queen Camilla might be why the republican movement welcomes the royals and wishes them well. They welcome the monarchy, but then with a bit of Australian braggadocio, say it is a “farewell tour”. Although, as they also emphasise, becoming a republic carries no implication of leaving the commonwealth. Indeed, India, a country of almost 1.5 billion, is a republic and a member of the commonwealth.
So we are not suggesting cultural revolution if we make a transition – not the removal of royal insignia from bush courthouses, not the smashing of coronation mugs nor the chiding of those who drank from them. But we are pointing out the mere reality that at present we have a head of state, the king, who cannot with the best speak for us in international forums, who cannot know who we are or our broader dreams and aspirations. If Charles sought to speak for us internationally, to be a real head of state, he would draw the hostility of his own government in Westminster. And if our prime minister spoke freely … well, he would draw criticism.
And so we have few who can do that. We have had governor generals who have spoken nobly for us: Sir Zelman Cowen, Sir William Deane, Dame Quentin Bryce, Sir Peter Cosgrove. But they are not our heads of state. They are viceroys, sub-heads.
There is a question I would like to put out there, as a bemused citizen. According to the judgment of the high court, the sovereignty in the land was never surrendered, and thus Australia is Aboriginal land. Legislation and the high court itself, however, had no intention to give Aboriginal peoples title in alienated lands. That was always clear, except to proto-fascists in the media and politics. But sovereignty was never yielded, nonetheless.
Eddie Mabo, as a gardener at James Cook university, hit the library at lunchtime and late afternoon to research specifically this question. He learned his ancestral garden on Murray Island was crown land and set himself to prove it wasn’t. And the high court found, after his death of cancer, that it was not.
So how is it we still use that culturally potent term, crown land? I know it’s only a legal fiction, but hasn’t the time of the crown gone?
The monarch now enters his dominion of Australia and finds people haven’t been square with him since the long-ago referendum. He is King of Australia, but that fact isn’t mentioned in many public forums, or in the oath of allegiance of new citizens.
In the early nineties the royal image was ubiquitous. You had no doubt you were living under the British monarch. It is as if, in modern Australia, the monarchy is an institution for which many officials dare not speak their love.
If Charles is our monarch then his name should be intoned in oaths and whenever we raise a toast! His face should be in every public place! At the moment we are pretending we’re not a republic at heart. But oops, here he is! Is the curtsy still the go?
In any case, isn’t Australia itself, with all its complexities and strengths and flaws, enough to make an oath to? It is for me. A humble thing, but my own. In the meantime, travel easefully King Charles. Thank you for reminding us of our kinship with the British Isles. The raw material of my own trade is the language in which we poor writers try to soften the Australian sun, court the southern stars. And that will never die.
Thomas Keneally is a novelist. He is the author of more than 40 books, including the Booker prize-winning novel Schindler’s Ark
