Queen of Australia

Mungo MacCallum

Perhaps Surprisingly, apsurprisingly, the view that best sums LIP middle Australia's attitudes to the Queen's Jubilee visit comes from none other t,shan Edward Gough Whitlam—the Labour Minister who was sacked by her viceroy and has confidently prpclicted that Australia will be a republic within twenty Years. In his regular column in a popular afternoon paper, Whitlam wrote a week before the Queen was due: 'For twenty-five Years the Queen has performed her constitutional duties with grace and dedication, secure in the loyalty and affection of her subjects. It is true that her visits to Australia have been field days for strutting Conservative Politicians, odious social climbers, flagwaving sycophants, professional loyalists aLnd Poseurs of every description. But they ila.ve never managed to spoil the pleasure that ordinary Australians take in welcoming their head of state. It will be the same when the Queen arrives next week. She is assured of a loyal and affectionate welcome.' True, Whitlam went on to compare the Queen With the Australian Governor-General who sacked him, to the latter's disadvantage. One of his constant themes since November 1975 has been,'the Queen would never have dune it.' But his remarks, aimed shrewdly at

the middle ground of the electorate, illustrate the fundamental dichotomy in Aus tralian attitudes towards Britain in general and , the Monarchy in particular.

,. Lawyers may fulminate at the continua:!un of outdated legal and constitutional links with the United Kingdom. Economists and businessmen may disparage the collapse the British economy, and the continued reliance on North Sea oil, Tory politicians rest blame most of Australia's industrial un, on the militancy of migrant English shop stewards, middleand working-class Australians may grumble about whining °Ins and complain that they will neither (irk nor wash. But for all that, the bulk of the Australian population remains obstinately royalist. Not, mark you, with the same eAnthusiasm reserved for visiting pop groups.

series of radio surveys taken at the same timeas Whitlam's column appeared revealed that not very many people were

actually aware of when the Queen was due to land, or what she was doing, or intended ci go out and cheer—but even fewer were Prepared to criticise the idea. Reaction to any imagined slight to the Monarchy was surprisingly fierce. Three examples: the enterprising Member for Canberra gained national headlines when he suggested that Abba, the pop group, whose Australian tour coincides with that of the Queen, should be invited to change their

schedule to fly to Canberra and meet her, on the grounds that some gossip columnist had once described the Queen as an Abba fan. The pop group replied politely that they were fully booked, and to the consternation of their manager found themselves the subject of an angry reaction from those middleclass parents who had formerly revered them as the only wholesome influence on their otherwise corrupted children. Then there was the headline story 'Whitlam Snubs Queen,' in which it was reported that the Opposition leader would not have dinner with the Queen at Government House because of his feud with the GovernorGeneral. Whitlam's agitated staff immediately put a stop writ on the paper involved and issued a statement saying that he would in fact be meeting the Queen on six separate occasions, and was looking forward to them all immensely.

Then there was the case of the National Press Club in Canberra, which, with an enterprise unusual for that conservative establishment, invited Australia's bestknown advocate of republicanism, the distinguished author Donald Horne, to address the club on the day of the Queen's arrival. Protests poured in, including one from the anglophile former high commissioner to London, Sir Alexander Downer, who described it all as a calculated insult and a disgrace to Australia. The club stuck to its guns, but received a number of resignations from associated members—most of them retired army officers.

There is just no percentage in attaCks, real or imagined, on the Royal Family in Australia, which explains the curious silence of even the more radical sections of the Left on the massive expenditure planned for the tour, at a time when Australia is (by Australian standards) deep in recession. And massive the expenditure will be, by the time the final bill comes in. Even by the standards of previous royal tours, the current one is aiming at a monumental vulgarity which would bring tears of joyful rage to the eyes of Willie Hamilton. Virtually the whole of the country's armed services have been rehearsing for weeks to demonstrate their—or at least their government's—unquestioning allegiance to the throne. Cauldrons of cooks and gardens of florists are being flown around the country at vast expense to sculture royal crests in ice, butter, and gladioli. The beasts of the field, the fowls of the air and the fish of the sea have been slaughtered in unprecedented numbers for a display of gluttony that has the nation's medical profession rubbing its hands in gleeful anticipation. The entire Cabinet has been told that striped trousers and morning coats are de rigueur for formal occasions—a prime ministerial directive that has caused the Minister for Social Security, Senator Margaret Guilfoyle, many sleepless nights. And what an early local politician referred to as 'Australia's bunyip aristocracy' has been engaged in a display of elbowing, kicking and gouging for a chance to touch the Royal glove which has had even the most hardened reporters of state occasions diving for cover.

In the midst of this, the small band of dedicated Australian republicans who saw the Remembrance Day coup as their big break-through can only shake their heads and wonder where they went warn: The

suggestion that no real harm, as_ -ara lot of good, would be done if Australia's

links with the ere gradually and amicably allowed to ci, lye has been swept aside by wave after wave of poinp„u ceremony. A usually reliable opinion poll taken earlier this year revealed that the startlingly high figure of 48 per cent of Australian adults, including nearly onethird of all Conservative voters, believed that Australia should sever its remaining legal and constitutional ties with Great Britain, which the republicans thought was terrific. But now it appears that whatever this result may have meant, one thing it certainly did not mean was that any significant section of the community wanted to get rid of the monarchy.

Although less than two-thirds of Australians can now claim descent from what the traditionalists still describe as 'AngloSaxon' (by which they mean British) stock, the post-war influx of migrants has not changed the position to any real extent ; indeed, many of the European migrants— especially those from Eastern Europe—are among the country's most fervent royalists. One of the grimmer examples of Royal tour trivia concerns the Romanian migrant working in the very remote mining town of Cobber Pedy, whose mates told him that the Queen would be passing through on her 1954 tour, and who spent six months building a 200-foot:high royal crest out of empty beer bottles in the side of a nearby hill. When his mates explained that it was all a practical joke, and that she wasn't coming at all, the Romanian committed suicide.

Such extremes are considered unlikely to occur this time around, but while the enthusiasm has waned, it has definitely not got past the stage of a slight sense of déjà vu. The Australian republican movement today is confined, as it always has been, to a handful of middle-class radicals in search of what they call an Australian identity, backed up rather tentatively by the far Left (who consider the question basically irrelevant) and, of course, a fair number of Australians of Irish descent. The bands for the visit play everything from 'Advance Australia Fair' to 'The Dying Stockman,' but 'God Save The Queen' remains top of the pops.

One of the paradoxes of what is left of ardent anglophilia in Australia is that its most outspoken defender happens to be a New Zealander of Danish extraction, the Premier of (appropriately enough) Queensland, Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. Mr BjelkePetersen is an object of derision verging on disbelief outside his own state, but within Queensland he has managed to integrate veneration for Great Britain, and of course the Crown, into a highly successful political programme based on the idea that any change is playing into the hands of the Communists, for whom he is believed to look under his bed before retiring every night. It was Bjelke-Petersen who tried unilaterally to appoint the Queen 'Queen of Queensland,* a move which, he excitedly explained to his constituents, was essential to prevent Australia becoming a socialist republic. It was also Bjelke-Petersen who appealed directly (and of course unsuccessfully) to Buckingham Palace against Whitlanis moves to scrap Australia's antiquated system of appeals to the Privy Council.

Working closely with him are a number of very right-wing organisations, consisting mainly of retired army officers, who push the line that the Monarchy is essential if Australia is to remain a democracy. BjelkePetersen has even been known to refer to England as 'the Mother Country'—one of the few Australians left to do so. (The other old synonym, 'Home,' has disappeared from the language almost completely. Nothing has really emerged to replace it ; perhaps the nearest thing is 'Ponnmyland,' usually uttered with at least grudging affection.) It is hard to understand just why this unquestioning subservience to what is now, for all practical purposes, a not very powerful foreign country should still strike such a responsive chord even in Queensland, which is generally referred to in Australia as 'the Deep North,' but the fact is that it does. In any even vaguely realistic assessment Australia's foreign policy and defence arrangements are now centred squarely on the United States, and trade revolves increasingly around Japan, but there has been no sign that either country will ever occupy the role that Britain used to, and, to a large extent, through the Queen, still does. No Australian politician now, with the possible exception of Bjelke-Petersen, would feel the need to lapse into the saccharine fulsomeness of Sir Robert Menzies's immortal afterdinner speech: 'I did but see her passing by but yet I love her till (die.' Equally, however, no one would dare attack -the monarchy with the same verve as is now relatively common in Britain—at least no one who had any hope of reaching the top.

Again, Whitlam provides the example: when he was asked to appear on the recent BBC Jubilee programme, the BBC's research staff asked if he had any little anecdote to illustrate the human side of the Queen. He thought for a while, but the only one he could come up with was the time he had shared a couch with the Queen and a threelegged corgi, which broke wind noisily and continuously. The Queen's self-possession, he felt, had been superb. The BBC was willing to use it, but Whitlam and his staff, upon consideration, were not: Great Britain might be ready for it, but Australia wasn't.

Within the Labour Party itself, where a certain amount of anti-monarchism might be expected, there is at most an amused tolerance. After the Queen accepted the title 'Queen of Australia' in 1974, she retired to a reception for which a number of Labour wheeler-dealers had insisted on invitations. The vice-president of the party, Jack Egerton, who likes to be thought of as a left-winger, approached her and said affectionately: 'Well, luv, you've been naturalised,' which more or less summed up the party's feeling. Egerton, incidentally, went on to accept a knighthood, as a result of which he was expelled from the party. Some of the Labour people affect privately to scorn the whole business, but they still get in the queue to meet the Queen, and it's a pretty safe bet that they more or less accurately reflect Australian feelings as a whole. We mightn't think too much of England, but at heart we're still impressed by royalty, even to the extent of giving the Queen a horse worth £19,000 as a Jubilee present. The one thing we won't do for her is throw the centenary cricket Test. Even for the most ardently monarchist Australian, that would be taking things a hit too far.