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One curate in our parish claimed to dream about the royal family and believed everyone did. Any easy familiarity I had with an idealised royal family collapsed with the dismissal of the Whitlam government. Malcolm Turnbull is persuasive when he says in Australia there are now more Elizabethans than monarchists.
I went to the breakfast table, where my father was reading The Sun. I was just old enough to read, and knew a screaming headline when I saw one. THE KING IS DEAD. Sixteen months later Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. I told my mother I'd like to be the Queen. 'No, you wouldn't,' she declared.
In the south people love to compare Sydney and Melbourne Catholicism, as if there is no other. But no one does Catholicism quite as ecumenically, quite as incarnationally, and quite as laidback as in Queensland. There is something distinctive and admirable in it, and it is summed up in the life of Fr John Dobson.
I saw a gloved hand at the window and that was it. The experience turned out to be the one time when I saw the Queen 'in the flesh'. I had gone under duress, having even at that young age vestigial republican tendencies. A few weeks ago I went with more enthusiasm to see another Queen.
Tomorrow, Labor will be swept from office in Queensland. The resounding defeat is not easy to explain. While there have been many policy debacles and scandals under Labor, the Queensland government has not resembled the shame of its New South Wales counterpart prior to its defeat last year.
There is a story that the king, having learned surfing at Bondi, introduced the sport to Tonga. I asked if he was ever fearful of sharks. 'There is nothing to fear,' he said. 'Look them straight in the eye like this!' At which he squared his shoulders in a demonstration of regal might which I shall never forget.
Many Australian politicians who should know better give the people and the media exactly what they want: rancorous confrontations and barbed insults. The 'tough' way in which Australian politics is played corrodes civility and potentially erodes our democracy.
The fact the Queen is a very nice lady doesn't negate her inherited privilege, her arbitrary powers, and the fact her reign isolates many Australians. There is a myth that Australia is a larrikin nation. But we are a nation not of provocateurs, but of conformists.
In a simpler time a visit from our head of state seemed to make us feel better about ourselves. Like many Australians, I hold dear the old lady, but have no fear that democracy will shatter when her life and the monarchy slowly come to their natural end.
145-156 out of 200 results.