The template for the period following Queen Elizabeth II’s passing has been assiduously sketched by Sam Knight in this fabulous 2017 piece in The Guardian — a piece that poignantly flashes forward to the absurdity and solemnity of the current moment.
Still, it is surreal to see it actually playing out — the blanket coverage of the queen’s passing and every detail since shrinks in comparison everything since the World Trade Center attacks (the fact 9/11’s 21st anniversary barely rated a mention when it fell this weekend is illustrative).
If you receive news update emails from the likes of The New Daily or The Age, you will know the queen’s coffin arriving in Edinburgh was the biggest news they had to carry this morning — and one suspects that every stop of her journey will get the same treatment until she is finally laid to rest on September 19. But this is far from the most absurd part of the coverage.
The ABC is forcing poor Michael Rowland to hang around outside Buckingham Palace in front of the camera, updating us on the goings-on at midnight (short version: not a lot, forcing him to interview a different ABC reporter in Scotland). US public broadcaster NPR has run a story about what will happen to the queen’s dogs. Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson are apparently getting two corgis but “it is still unclear who will look over Elizabeth’s two other dogs — a cocker spaniel named Lissy and a dachshund corgi hybrid named Candy. Some royal experts previously speculated that the dogs may be separated and given to various family members.”
But probably the most truly bonkers bit of clickbait so far is The Herald Sun printing the following piece about a royal fan “reportedly” spotting “the outline of the late monarch in a random cloud formation, just moments after the queen’s death”.
The hedging of the “reportedly” is entirely necessary, by the way; no amount of pareidolia can turn that cloud into a human head.
Of course, this coverage is as wide as the ocean and as deep as a puddle. It is curious, especially in Australia, that among the endless stories of fond personal reminiscences there is so little room for any even complicated feelings, so little about the dispossession and stolen wealth on which a monarchy cannot help but be built. So when Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi says she “cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples”, it gets attention on account of One Nation’s Pauline Hanson’s response that Faruqi ought to “piss off back to Pakistan”. In the current climate, it is Faruqi’s comments that are described as a slur.
