Charles Wooley: Aussies need breath of fresh heir

I’m not here to rain on your royal parade, just to remind us all (myself included) that the love of monarchy is totally irrational, writes Charles Wooley

SUDDENLY nothing else mattered. Not the war in Ukraine, the plight of the Uighurs, the melting of the Antarctic, the floods in Pakistan, terrible droughts in Europe and North America, the impending moonshot and back down to Earth, even the pandemic and Australia’s woefully inadequate public health system.

Perhaps many of us were relieved not to have to worry about the big issues and instead became immersed in the pomp, circumstance, ritual and Ruritanian tradition of a distant country that apparently is dearer to our collective Australian hearts than we might have realised.

The hardly unexpected death of the 96-year-old Queen of England snared Australians in a noose of grief.

On the ABC, which is a Left-wing republican organisation (I worked there for many years), reporters everywhere were describing the demise of the monarch as “tragic”.

Sad, yes, as is the death of anyone we feel we have come to know over the course of our whole lives. But tragic, no.

Queen Elizabeth enjoys one of her visits to Tasmania in the 1950s. A crowd of 12,000 schoolchildren, possibly including Charles Wooley’s childhood nemesis Jack, lined up to greet the Queen and Prince Philip at York Park Oval in Launceston. Picture: Courtesy of the Mercury archive.

The death of innocent civilians in Ukraine at the hands of the Kremlin butcher is tragic. The death of the aged Queen Elizabeth is just the natural process of British history.

If English monarchs didn’t eventually die, then Elizabeth’s ancestor George III, a mad, fat German who lost the American colonies, would still be on the throne.

I’m not here to rain on your royal parade, just to remind us all (myself included) that the love of monarchy is totally irrational. The people you are asked to revere have always considered themselves chosen by God. But in fact in most cases they are no better than you and me, and often, without mentioning names, much worse.

The English royals might well be considered “accidental” rulers because their only claim to be better than us commoners is the accident of birth.

If we chose cricket captains and prime ministers that way you would be outraged, yet that is precisely how we allow the choosing of our (non) Australian head of state.

Had he not been caught out it isn’t inconceivable that the disgraced second son, Andrew, might have got the job of ruling over us.

Scottish nationalists, like Australian republicans, have been waiting for this moment. All agree, despite a dislike of the concept, that we got lucky with Elizabeth. But now with the advent of her heirs and successors, this state of affairs surely cannot go on forever.

Queen Elizabeth II arrives at a state reception at City Hall in Hobart in 1954. Picture: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Like Australia, the Scots, having lost one referendum on the vexed question, are now looking for a solution that mightn’t call for a repeat of history: as in the symbolic beheading of Charles III.

A Scottish expert on these processes, Professor Gerry Hassan, argues for recognising the unrealities of monarchy rather than resisting them.

“The monarchy is about magic, illusion and fakery,” he said this week.

“Psychologically, as human beings, we have use for that. It is something to believe in. But the political union (with England) is debatable in its usefulness.”

So, like the Prof, some Scots think they can cherry-pick and choose political independence from Britain but still retain the magic of the monarchy.

They point out this is exactly what has worked in Australia for 120 years. But with Elizabeth gone this game of thrones loses its leading lady and most beloved character. Under the eccentric, stuffy and bumbling Charles the inherent tendency towards comic soap opera will intensify. As that happens, surely, in both Scotland and Australia, the show will lose its public affection.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip arrive at Parliament House in Hobart, Tasmania, during their Commonwealth Tour of Australia, 1954. Picture: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

For all that, the Queen and I go a long way back. Just like you, I have known her all my life. I first heard of her when I was a preschooler in one of the toughest towns in Tasmania.

Rossarden was a timber-built mining town in the North-East, perched beneath Ben Lomond. Nothing ever happened there but violent fights, drunken affrays and car crashes.

Nothing until 1953, when the Queen visited Tasmania for the first time and a bus was arranged to take all the school kids to the big smoke, Launceston.

I’ve written about this before, but who isn’t reminiscing?

It was a time of great excitement. My worst enemy was a (literally) lousy kid named Jack, who once pulled a small insect out of his hair and threatened to put it in mine if I didn’t lend him my new tricycle.

Yet even the vile Jack was up for the royal occasion, as was I until my mother explained it was only school kids going on the trip and I was not yet one of those.

I was inconsolable. My enemy would get to meet the Queen, while I would be staying home.

In that terrible moment of injustice, I think I became a republican.

According to family legend I stamped my small foot and shouted, “Well then she is no queen of me.”

Years later the Queen and I actually crossed paths.

Queen Elizabeth II meets Launceston Mayor Mr Pitt at York Park, in 1954. Picture: Courtesy of the Mercury archive.

I was a university student and I just happened to be in Elizabeth St, Hobart, trapped in an adoring and cheering throng of monarchists.

As the royal car slowly passed, the Queen and I exchanged a glance and for a moment the world stopped.

I wanted to tell her I was actually a hapless republican caught in the crowd. But in the frozen moment she smiled at me as if to say: “One is so glad you finally got to see us. Rest assured we never did see that dreadful boy Jack in the crowd in Launceston in 1953.”

Then she was gone, and we wouldn’t meet again for more than a decade.

The Queen and I next caught up in London in 1984.

I was with the ABC and editing a television story about the IRA, whose behaviour back then added little credit to republican causes, anywhere.

There was a commotion in the street below and my editor and I leaned out the window to see what was up.

It was the Queen, opening an architectural exhibition next door.

Queen Elizabeth II with Premier Robert Cosgrove, left, at Western Junction Airport, Launceston, during her 1954 visit to Tasmania.

She looked up and once again we locked eyes and time slowed down.

Three floors below she wouldn’t hear my explanation that an Australian republic was a matter of historical inevitability and not to be taken as a personal criticism.

Her wave and smile only said: “Hello again Charles. One remembers our last meeting in Tasmania. Thank you for being here today and one wonders when we shall meet again.”

That would happen in Queensland in the late 1990s in the outback town of Longreach.

I had travelled for hours with a camera crew and a busload of monarchists from some dusty hamlet so far back up the track that Longreach seemed like a capital city.

In my story I was asking what it was that gave people in a place more like Mars than England such enthusiasm for a remote monarchy in a land of gentle green fields 17,000km away.

Perhaps the question answered the question.

In this unforgiving, harsh and arid landscape, perhaps the Queen embodied ancestral memories of another place.

A white-Australian dreaming.

Oddly, this time the Queen came right up to me at the barricade and treated me like I was just another punter.

Unbelievably it was as if she had never seen me before.

“Hello, have you been waiting long?”

I doubt she heard me above the brass band and the crowd as I politely replied: “Only two hundred years, your majesty.”