The Queen has been held up in newspapers around the world as a “unifying force” in the wake of her death. She has been described as someone who symbolised stability during decades of rapid change.
Some newspapers have chosen to concentrate on her personality while others have praised her fortitude and loyalty throughout her reign.
A 24-page commemorative magazine tribute to the “Queen of all our hearts” has been run by Newscorp across its stable of mastheads, which includes Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun in Melbourne and Brisbane’s The Courier Mail.
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Alongside many pictures celebrating her life were the words “a steadfast monarch who never wavered as wars, pandemics and prime ministers came and went around her”. Nine, which oversees the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, looked at how Australia will mark the Queen’s death.
Parliament in Canberra will be suspended for 14 days, according to Chief political correspondent David Crowe, while governor-general David Hurley and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will travel to the UK for the Queen’s funeral.
Across the ditch, the Queen was praised for being the first reigning monarch to visit New Zealand.
Ex-New Zealand Woman’s Weekly editor Jenny Lynch recalled the young Queen’s smile in 1953 during a trip with her husband to a country “desperate to demonstrate our love and loyalty”.
“She had extraordinary resolve. She never deviated in her devotion to duty,” Ms Lynch wrote for Stuff, which prints Wellington’s The Dominion Post and The Press in Christchurch.
“We respected and admired her. And we never stopped loving that wonderful smile.”
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal in the US said the Queen provided “steady, self-effacing leadership” in her “exemplary reign during an era that tested British unity and fortitude”.
The Queen was, it added, “that rarest of things in the modern world: A widely beloved national figure also respected around the world”.
“Her unique charisma tended to obscure the anachronism that is any hereditary monarchy, which leaves to fate the question of whether a country will get the leader it needs at the right time,” the paper said.
The corresponding group at The Washington Post said “distilling her reign to statistics misses her larger contribution to British society and our cultural consciousness”.
It added: “Steady as her ubiquitous profile on stamps and coins, the Queen embodied the British stiff upper lip.
“The Queen’s popularity and longevity have acted as a unifying force, even as Brexit has unravelled Britain’s ties to Europe and the links binding the UK countries to each other have loosened.
“For more than 70 years, Elizabeth II symbolised stability, and Britain was the better for it.”
Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten praised the Queen, who adorns its front page, for her “sense of duty and love”, adding in a Twitter post she had “become Queen of both the British and the entire world”.
Germany’s Bild said “from now everything is different. A new era begins” while the liveblog of The Times of India, the world’s highest-circulating English-language newspaper, carried a photograph of the Union Jack at half mast at the British High Commission in Delhi.
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