There is an undeniable power to monarchy. The monarch is an archetype on our collective unconscious, along with the deity, the prophet, Christ figures and the princesses little girls seek stories of, even in the new world of women’s power. Kingship is there with all the rest of our psychic paraphernalia. The Anglican church is still locked into believing the late Queen and her monarchy is, holus-bolus, God’s will, and will be in the embarrassing situation of having to pretend that the universe and its deity intended every nuance of her life.
The mystique, the voodoo, derives – for my generation – from the surfaces of money, from black-and-white film sequences of her and her sister Margaret (a mythic role-player herself as wild Dionysian princess), and from the freshly minted marriage the young Queen brought all the way to Australia in 1954. These images have a religious force. She was omnipresent.
My first passports described me as the Queen’s subject. When, in the early 1960s, I asked a military recruiter whether I could take an oath to the Australian people and not to her, I was told, “Don’t be a fucking dickhead, son.” The people of my childhood town of Kempsey spent their mental energy on the question of why my grandfather would not stand for God Save George V, Edward VIII and George VI in the cinema. One way or another, monarchy was a daily question that never went away. And thus, as an old postcolonial Australian, I felt that when Elizabeth Regina expired it was as if someone in the family had died. A remarkable aunt who was not loved but, to use that substitute word, “admired”. And we all have to give it to the good old stick! She made it to the dark harbour with her monarchy still flourishing and with the empire having morphed into a more fraternal Commonwealth. She outlasted and undid our republican impulses in Britain and the former colonies and kept even republics like India as pious members of the Commonwealth “Club”. And our monarchy isn’t her fault. The constitution gave us the power to go to a republic, and for interesting reasons we didn’t.
The Irish socialist organisation, People Before Profit, called immediately for an end to an “outdated and utterly unjust tradition”, and declared that beneath it all was famine and atrocity and outrageous race tyranny. But in the government houses of the Commonwealth, decent folk, citizens who do sophisticated work, often to help other members of society, queued for hours to place their names in condolence books.
In the circumstances, I am cast back to two past republicans I would get a huge kick out of showing the front pages of Saturday’s dailies to. With just days to the royal funeral to go, they would simply ask, how can everyone maintain the palaver for that long? Are there enough adjectives to go around? These two Australian republicans would simply not have believed the same overkill and nonstop public piety was still in operation; that the reliable old business of monarchy was still in place and compelling our media to hollow, cloying veneration.
The first republican I would like to show the present to is booze-struck Henry Lawson, author of the scathing poem in Queen Victoria’s jubilee, in which he described Victoria as the “ordinary woman whom the English call ‘the Queen’”. He asks the question: what has she done to be so adored? That’s what amazes republicans most, and Lawson sees it.
The other Australian is John Shaw Strange. Strange was involved in an 1820 plot to kill the British cabinet ministers. The conspirators’ leader was a philosopher, Arthur Thistlewood, who lectured in public houses and belonged to a philosophy called “Spencean Philanthropy”, named after the late Thomas Spence. Spenceans believed in liberty and fraternity, and in the idea that Britain, locked up in lordly estates, was the people’s garden, and that Christ was not kidding when he condemned the rich and their chances of entering heaven. Nearly every convict sent to Australia was influenced by Spence at least through such rhymes as:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose!
Strange would be astonished that this late in history we still, and at such tiresome length, mutter our prayers for the so-called House of Windsor.
There is no doubt that the late Queen’s father, the shy King George VI, would have been gratified by her reign and that she was the very model of a constitutional monarch. But that’s the point. From George I if not from Charles II, the monarchs got that message – you’re a king subject to parliament and according to limited prerogatives. We will deify you as a symbol of state as long as you don’t rock the boat. Late in her reign, there was a small crack in the wall of constitutionality the Queen maintained for a lifetime. She was overheard to complain about “irritating” world leaders who wouldn’t attend the Glasgow climate summit. “They talk, but they don’t do,” she said, with an exasperation the rest of us shared.
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“What about the dismissal of Whitlam then?” asks the true republican. It is hard to sheet the blame for that home to her. Certainly, as historian Jenny Hocking has shown us, the Queen’s secretary was in touch with John Kerr and barracking for him appallingly. Prince Charles had a very friendly and inappropriately sympathetic correspondence with Kerr. But we cannot say the Queen was directly involved or more than peripherally engaged by the matter. Admittedly, a few years after it happened, she did seem to condone Kerr’s decision by awarding him Knight Grand Cross of the Victorian Order, an award within the personal discretion of the monarch. Even so. Republican hopes that her fingerprints were on the knife were not realised. And to be honest the circumstances of the dismissal were rare in her history. And perhaps she thought the award of Knight Grand Cross would fortify a tattered governor generalate.
By the way, after the dismissal, Kerr tried the same tactic by offering other imperial honours to potential critics. Patrick White, the winner of the Nobel prize for literature, was offered one and refused. I was offered one down from that, Commander of the Order of the British Empire. I don’t know what the great Patrick said in his refusal, but in mine I said I pitied any empire of which I was a commander.
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The Queen’s overheard complaints were at the opening of the Welsh parliament in October last year, and to emphasise the matter, it was rare. And that is it: a constitutional monarch proves their virtues by restraining, and refraining from, one’s individuality. It is lack of individuality as a person that makes a monarch, and it is the negative virtues of not doing naughty stuff that allows a committed and orderly life to be expanded by commentators into rare gifts and shining goodness. God helps true characters who wander into the monarchic frame. Poor Fergie, excoriated Meghan. A form of martyrdom, à la Diana, is not unlikely. The Queen lived a long life repressing herself and did it so well that now she will be buried under an avalanche of adjectives that signify, above all, her achievement was she sat on her true nature.
So the encomiums fall flat and stick to our earlobes like treacle. Because they are signs of a woman being disciplined by herself to a remarkable extent. Negative virtues are then elevated to the rhapsodies of positive, godlike, saintly probity.
But can Charles, a passionate man and an interesting one, swallow his individuality and thus do the right thing by the monarchy? Read his reckless letters to Sir John. Read his very welcome statements on climate and architecture. He is far more assertive than his mother. And his monarchy will be more controversial than his mother’s. As for us, first of all, we must enshrine the Indigenous voice to parliament. And then, history calls on us again to get an Australian head of state. Surely! Otherwise, when the Brits depose him, Charles and his partner Camilla, now the Queen consort, will seek asylum in the enduring Crown Commonwealth of Australia.
• Thomas Keneally is a novelist and was the first chair of the Australian Republican Movement in 1992
