It was scorching hot on the Dubbo oval when Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip visited the western New South Wales town on 10 February 1954. A large crowd turned out to see them. Students stood in rows with their teachers. The pageantry had been months in the planning but it was the heat that Kate Crawford, then a primary school student, remembered most.
Crawford and her classmates donned a special uniform for the occasion and waited on the oval, “standing in the scorching heat for hours”, while town dignitaries hosted the young Queen in a specially constructed podium in the shade.
There was not much time for sightseeing. In their 58-day tour, the first Elizabeth had made since her coronation and the first visit by any reigning monarch to Australia, the royal couple visited 57 towns and cities, including every capital city except Darwin.
They were greeted upon arrival in Sydney harbour by a crowd of 1 million people – more than half the city’s population at the time. It was the first televised event in Australian history. Newspaper coverage described “unprecedented chaos in transport movement” as hundreds of thousands of people lined the route taken by the royals and stopped traffic. It was, the Muswellbrook Chronicle proclaimed the next day, an “unofficial holiday”.
The tour was the single biggest event planned in Australia to date. More than 100,000 schoolchildren were recruited, in their uniforms, to hear the Queen speak and the NSW education department issued a souvenir exercise book for the royal visit.
In the northern Victorian town of Mildura, the Sunraysia Daily reported at the time, about 200 people fainted from the heat while waiting for the Queen and Prince Philip to arrive.
An estimated 7 million Australians – 70% of the population at the time – turned out to see the 27-year-old monarch at some point in the tour. The Queen, in turn, seemed fond of Australia – even Queensland, which had presented her with 500 cases of tinned pineapples for her wedding in 1947, was included on the lengthy itinerary.
It was the first of 16 visits the Queen made to Australia during her 70-year reign. Three generations of Australians have memories of standing on tippy-toes, in their crispest school uniform, to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty.
The visits got shorter and the crowds smaller as time passed and Australia’s relationship to the monarchy and the British empire changed. But even as the Commonwealth fell out of favour, the Queen herself remained popular – for the most part.
She was the patron of 27 Australian organisations, including the RSL, the Scouts and the Royal Melbourne hospital. Her eldest son, King Charles III, attended two terms at an Australian boarding school, the Timbertop program at Geelong Grammar.
Her visits were a mix of royal pomp and acute awkwardness. In 1988, she stood alongside the then-prime minister, Bob Hawke, a staunch republican, to watch the running of the Queen Elizabeth Stakes. Their political differences were overcome by a shared love of horse racing.
In 1999 Australia doubled down on its commitment to the crown: 55% of voters, asked at a referendum whether they would support appointing an Australian head of state, voted no.
In 2011, at the time of Queen Elizabeth’s last visit to Australia, the actor Hugh Jackman remarked: “Even the republicans, the ones in Australia who want to see Australia move on, still have great respect and love for the Queen. I’ve never heard anyone say different.”
In 2019, the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who led the Australian Republic Movement (ARM) in the lead-up to the referendum, said a new campaign should not be staged until Queen Elizabeth’s reign had come to an end.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, a longtime supporter of making Australia a republic, has created the office of assistant minister for the republic after his Labor government was elected in May. Its election platform included support for an Australian head of state and Albanese told a 2019 dinner hosted by ARM that “a modern Australian republic is an idea whose time has come”.
Still, on the occasion of her platinum jubilee, Albanese said Australia held Queen Elizabeth “in respect and affection” and joked that his own birth may have been delayed by his mother’s determination to see the Queen on her 1963 tour. But he added that the nation was “no longer what it was at the dawn of [Elizabeth’s] reign”.
“No longer parent and young upstart, we stand as equals,” he said.
During the seven decades of her reign, Australia went from a proud vassal of the British empire to an independent nation in all but name that began to reckon with its colonial beginnings.
In 1970, at the bicentennial of the arrival of Captain Cook on Australian shores, protesters threw wreaths into Botany Bay where the Queen was sailing in her royal yacht to watch a reenactment of British soldiers firing muskets on the Gweagal people.
The protests and petitions continued for the next five decades and in 1999 a delegation of senior Aboriginal figures met with the Queen in Buckingham Palace, the first Aboriginal people to do so since 1793.
Last month, Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab-Wurrung woman, was asked to apologise after referring to the Queen as a coloniser while making her oath to parliament.
Criticism was not confined to the royal family’s colonial legacy. The release in 2020 of the palace letters – the correspondence between Buckingham Palace and the governor general Sir John Kerr about the dismissal of the prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975 – led to the Queen being accused of political interference, even though Kerr had carefully not informed the palace directly of his decision until after it was done, to protect the Queen.
Buckingham Palace denied the Queen had a role in Whitlam’s dismissal and said she had demonstrated “support for Australia” throughout her reign but maintained the letters should not have been released.
“While the royal household believes in the longstanding convention that all conversations between prime ministers, governor generals and the Queen are private, the release of the letters … confirms that neither Her Majesty nor the royal household had any part to play in Kerr’s decision to dismiss Whitlam,” a statement released at the time said.
Had the letters been released earlier, the Queen’s popularity in Australia may have cooled. By 2020, with Queen Elizabeth in her 90s, the public response was muted. Elizabeth had been queen for longer than most Australians had been alive: she was immovable.
Albanese, speaking after news broke of the monarch’s death, said Australia had lost a “wise and enduring presence”.
“Through the noise and turbulence of the years, she embodied and exhibited a timeless decency and an enduring calm,” he said.
“This time of mourning will pass but the deep respect and warm regard in which Australians have always held for her will never fade.”
