When Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip sailed into Sydney harbour on the SS Gothic on 3 February 1954, 1 million people – well over half the population of Sydney - lined the foreshore to greet their monarch.
She was 27, the mother of two small children and had been crowned just eight months earlier. It was the first time a British monarch had visited Australia: the world’s most famous – and most carefully curated – person had come to town.
Her arrival was the first televised event in the nation, with footage of the tour sent to a screen in Mosman. Over 58 days, the mass adoration continued, with immense crowds in every of the 57 towns she toured – not least in Wagga, New South Wales, where the population of 8,000 swelled to 18,000 on the day of her visit.
After many years of waiting to see her in the flesh, the anticipation was breathless, said Margot Riley, a curator at the State Library of NSW, which has an extensive collection of ephemera from royal tours even before 1954. “The marriage, the children, the coronation, the colour movie – it just built and built until finally they were in Australia,” she said.
The Queen opened a session of the commonwealth parliament in Canberra wearing her coronation gown, delivering a sense of that day’s pageantry to the realm. William Dargie’s official portrait marking the tour captured her wearing the Australia-themed wattle gown that she wore to a state banquet in a Sydney hall bedecked by 1,800 gladioli, 2,140 dahlias and 1,212 zinnias. The Tivoli theatre produced commemorative royal performance chocolates. The tour culminated in a state ball at Parliament House with a spread that featured boars’ heads, stuffed suckling pig and pheasant – and the coat-of-arms crafted from sugar and marzipan.
Her youth brought with it the fashions of Paris and the wizardry of colour newsreels from Westminster Abbey. The result, 10,500 miles from home, was monarch mania.
“It really was the beginning of celebrity and of people understanding glamour,” Riley said. “She was the personification of all of those elements of postwar life: youth, beauty, celebrity travel, that idea of the jet set – even though they came by boat.”
The tour was, according to a commemorative book cited by the National Museum of Australia, “a thunderous progress through thousands of miles lit to incandescence by the affection and enthusiasm of nine million devoted subjects”.
It also came after a line of strictly remote rulers. Victoria was not a great long distance traveller, Edward VII focused on Europe and George VI’s intention to visit Australia was scuppered by ill-health. Elizabeth was a long overdue, postwar show-stopper.
The ‘whistle-stop tour’
King Charles III’s inaugural visit as the monarch – he and his wife, Queen Camilla, landed in Sydney on Friday night – will be remembered as an entirely different affair.
On Friday the sails of the Opera House were lit in the King and Queen’s honour. The King, 75, will officially receive his representative, the governor general, Sam Mostyn. They will eat and meet at a community barbecue and see the work of bushfire fighters and Aboriginal groups. But, while there will be a reception hosted by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, at Parliament House, the premiers of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania have said they are unable to attend.
There will be no state banquet or ball – and, as much as it might send authorities into a tailspin, a crowd of a million well-wishers seems a remote possibility amid the merging of even mild republican sentiment with a social climate that puts royal tours well down the list of priorities for many Australians.
This time, the royal visitors will take in just Sydney and Canberra over four full days on the ground. The tour’s brevity, cut short – but not cancelled – because of the King’s cancer treatment, is “most unusual”, said associate professor Giselle Bastin, an expert on the British royal family at Flinders University. “Being very short and being so zoned-in on just those spaces makes it look like a whistle-stop tour rather than a royal tour.”
As part of his job, the King needs to meet with the governor general and the prime minister and break the 13-year hiatus between monarch’s visits. There is one measure by which he outcompetes his mother, however. This is his 17th visit to Australia – surpassing the Queen’s 16 tours.
“I think most people don’t realise he’s even coming – it’s just not anticipated, like a visit from Queen Elizabeth the Second was,” Bastin said.
“I don’t think it’s really sunk in that he’s King, King. In the way that the Queen was the Queen.
“Many Australians revered Queen Elizabeth II because she and they belong to an era where the idea of the sovereign, the monarch, was almost mystical. People see Charles very much as a mortal and I think that comes with less reverence.”
The next generation
Royal hysteria didn’t disappear after 1954. Princess Diana’s popularity far eclipsed Prince Charles’ on their 1983 tour – moments of which were recreated in the 2014 tour of Catherine and William, who brought along baby Prince George and duly caused a media frenzy.
Unlike George’s monarchy-boosting appeal, or the showbiz allure of newlyweds Meghan and Harry, who toured Australia in 2018, the King and Queen are “not young anymore. And I hate to say it, but youth is the thing, isn’t it?” Riley said.
“There’s just so much going on – the conflict in the Middle East, the cost-of-living and housing crisis. The prospect of a visit from an ageing royal is not much to be excited about – but it’s still King Charles’ first visit to Australia as reigning monarch.”
Monarchists and loyal royal fans will want to be part of the experience. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet advertises just four opportunities in which to meet or glimpse the royal pair between their meetings with charities, community representatives and politicians before heading to Apia, Samoa.
There are also wider cultural and technological shifts affecting the slimline tour. The definition of celebrity that the Queen first introduced to Australia has become, to a certain extent, broader and more bland.
“[Royals] are just on the daily socials, alongside Kardashians and everybody else. There’s no real sense of them being different, like in Queen Elizabeth’s era,” Bastin said. “They are giving TV interviews. They’re being filmed alongside Mary Berry making a cake. There’s no sense that they’re regal – but they’re still very interesting and captivating.”
No matter how they are viewed, their role remains separate, above prime ministers and world leaders. Their job is unlike any other, Bastin said – and that in itself cements the relevance of the tour.
“I think a lot of people are relieved that there’s someone there who is above party politics,” she said. “Having a constitutional monarch feels like a safety net in a world that’s producing Donald Trumps and Brexit.
“The royals have maintained some respect from the Australian public because we’re not very fond of our politicians either.”
