by Alan Attkinson

The last issue of Australian Folklore contains an article by Neville Crew in which he explains with admirable lucidity, three types of government: constitutional monarchy, such as exists in Britain, continental Europe and Asia; republic; and the system we know in Australia. Lucid as the article is, there are a couple of points I would want to argue with.

With reference to the dismissal of Mr Whitlam in 1975, the article quotes a letter from Sir Martin Charteris (sic), the Queen's Principal Private Secretary, to Mr Gordon Scholes, then Speaker of the House of Representatives. Scholes had asked that the Queen countermand the Prime Minister's dismissal. In reply, Charteris is quoted as saying that.

The Australian Constitution firmly places the prerogative powers of the Crown in the hands of the Governor General as the representative of the Queen in Australia.

Charteris does not seem to have cited any particular part of the Constitution, but the only relevant part is chapter l, section 2:

A Governor-General appointed by the Queen shall be Her Majesty's representative in the Commonwealth, and shall have and may exercise in the Commonwealth during the Queen's pleasure, but subject to this Constitution, such powers and functions of the Queen as Her Majesty may be pleased to assign to him.

This seems in fact to contradict Charteris' statement. The prerogative powers of the Crown in Australia are derived directly from the Queen, and are among the powers and functions mentioned above. The Constitution says very clearly that they are to be exercised by the Governor-General 'during the Queen's pleasure', which implies that the Queen can override her representative whenever the occasion seems to require it. Undoubtedly this is what was meant when the Constitution was drawn up. The Queen at that time was Victoria and, given the fact that Australia was very much part of the British Empire, 'the Queen's pleasure' referred to the overriding authority of the Government in London. Of course, the significance of that phrase now is another question. Presumably it still has some vestigial meaning.

Charteris was obviously using the term "Constitution" in a very broad sense. Constitutional conventions established between the two world wars did tend to raise the status of the Governor-General so that he occupied a position in Australia virtually equivalent to that of the King in Britain. But whether this meant that the monarch lost all his former significance in the exercise of the royal prerogative in Australia is another question.

The question is partly a legal one, to be answered by a technical examination of t he Constitution and of the conventions which have accrued since 1901. But there are broader implications. Scholes himself obviously believed that there was some point in asking the Queen to intervene, and in such a fundamental and untested issue, it is hard to believe that he was as much mistaken as Buckingham Palace liked to believe. But Scholes' appeal is a famous example of a much broader phenomenon. Many ordinary Australians assume that the Queen can - and even does - play an active part in Australian affairs. We hear frequently of appeals from this country for her to take some initiative or other in this part of the world. As recently as September 1993 (when the republican debate was in full flight) 700 Aboriginal leaders meeting in Canberra decided to send delegations to the Palace asking the Queen to take their side in debates over Mabo.

Neville Crew is probably not justified in taking Sir Martin Charteris' word for gospel. He may well be wrong in concluding, on Charteris' say-so, that 'the Constitution removes the power of the Monarch in Australia'. This brings me to my second comment on his article. In dealing with the difference between a constitutional monarchy and a republic, he describes only the more obvious and clearly defined powers of the Head of State. For instance he repeats the formula set out by Bagehot last century:

The only rights left to the Monarch (in Britain) are to be consulted, to encourage or to warn the government, and this is coupled with the obligation to accept the advice of the Prime Minister. The Queen may be influential in the regular private meetings with the Prime Minister, but she has no power to control or censor the decisions or actions of the Parliament.

Bagehot has had a peculiarly powerful influence over debates about the monarchy. The Queen is said to have brought up on him, which explains a lot about the profoundly detached style she has chosen to adopt in relation to her monarchies outside Britain. Bagehot also had things to say about the Monarch's relationship with the people at large. Here there was nothing about consulting, encouraging or warning. There was nothing about conversation at all. The main function of royalty within the wider world, beyond Whitehall, according to Bagehot, was to stand apart, to dazzle and mystify.

And yet, even now, this is not the common understanding of royalty. Bagehot is not widely read and his understanding of monarchy has done very little to shape common expectations, whose roots go back many generations. After two hundred years, Australians still try to talk to the Queen, but thanks to Bagehot (and maybe thanks to her own personality) she does very little talking back. In this regard, at least, Prince Charles promises an improvement (some might say 'in this regard, but no other'). He has a voice and he has obvious opinions.

A study of the place of royalty within Australian folklore is long overdue. Academic historians have taken a considerable time to get around to studying phenomena which seem in any sense 'un-Australian': the cities, religion, the middle-class, the lives of women. Royalty is now close to the front of the queue. I look forward to the current episode figuring in due course in some Ph.D. thesis:

'All is not yet lost,' said Bunyip Bluegum. 'without reverting to violent measures, I will engage to have the hat removed.'

'You will?' exclaimed Bill, grasping Bunyip by the hand.

'I will,' said Bunyip firmly. 'All I ask is that you strike a dignified attitude in the presence of these scoundrels, and, at a given word, follow my example.'

They all struck a dignified attitude in front of the puddin'- thieves, and Bunyip Bluegum, raising his hat, struck up the National Anthem, the others joining in with superb effect.

'Hats off in honour to our King,' shouted Bill, and off came all the hats. The puddin'-thieves, of course, were helpless. The Wombat had to take his hat off, or prove himself disloyal, and there was Puddin' sitting on his head.

It is a classic example of the monarch as deus ex machina in Australian affairs, an irrevocable and fixed star (though shining intermittently), a personage to be conjured up on all occasions, from puddings to parliament.

I would therefore add another layer of difference to Neville Crew's comparison of monarchy and republic. This is the layer of political culture, in the broadest sense of the term. The difference stems from the fact that a monarch is not a democratically constituted personage, while the president of a republic is. And yet, at the same time, of course, modern constitutional monarchy is contingent on democracy.

Democracy (if it is genuine) is a product and guarantee of modern civilisation at its best. But it does not follow that all the institutions which belong to a democracy have to be democratic themselves. Universities are not democratic, except here and there within their structures. Neither are newspapers and other forms of media. Neither are most institutions which serve merely cultural purposes: the book industry, art galleries, opera companies, folklore associations. And yet, these institutions, if they are well run, are fundamental to t he health of public life, and thus of democracy. These are institutions which carry on conversation with public opinion, and which enrich conversation within the members of democracy.

A nation which operates under a constitutional monarchy is one in which the Head of State is not democratically chosen. This means that the Headship is more thoroughly a cultural than a political institution. The identity of the incumbent depends, like most aspects of culture, on social habit and private inclination: courtship, marriage, procreation within a particular family. The prestige of the incumbent has a very obvious cultural context - it depends on common ideas about authority, heritage and nationality. The voice of the incumbent, like the voice of any cultural institution, is an independent voice rather than a representative one. It has a life of its own, quite apart from the machinery of electoral politics. Within a fully operational monarchy genuine conversations can take place between the Head of State, as Head of State, and other individuals.

This is not meant to happen within a republic. In a republic, as Donald Horne has argued, the Head of State has no independent voice. He or she is merely an image, a mirror by which the democracy honours itself.

There are, then, profound cultural-political differences between a monarchy and a republic. Monarchy is an institution which has always appealed to the popular imagination. It is the stuff of fairy stories, of folklore in general, and also of the worst kind of journalism. It is the oldest form of national authority on earth, and is encrusted with ritual, legend and enigma. In a cultural sense, it is richly independent of democracy, a fact which helps to make it both appealing and dangerous. The traditions of constitutional monarchy have been a means of reconciling kingship with democracy. Some - including large numbers of Australians - still see it as a fertile marriage of opposites. Others think of it as a strain on the imagination altogether too much to bear.

Published in Australian Folklore - A Yearly Journal of Folklore Studies, No.9

(July 1994) pp. 8-11)

THE BUNYIP MONARCHY

Alan Atkinson

Australia's history is replete with bunyips, and its monarchy is one of them. They first appear in the written records in 1845, when bunyip bones were found in the neighbourhood of Geelong. That is to say, the bones were so identified by several aborigines, all separately interviewed by a reporter for the Geelong Advertiser. On being shown the bones, the aborigines enunciated the word "bunyip" without hesitation, and they offered other detail of considerable interest. Bunyips are typically invisible but in May 1847 a living bunyip was sighted near the unction of the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers by an "intelligent lad" from a local squatting run. The animal was, the boy said, "about as big as a six months old calf, of a dark brown colour with a long neck and a long pointed head ... a thick mane of hair ... and two large tusks". It ran off with "an awkward shambling gallop".

Two months later a bunyip's skull which had been sent up from Melbourne was displayed at the Australian Museum, Sydney, and the Sydney Morning Herald published a learned, though speculative, essay on the subject by the distinguished local naturalist, William Sharp Macleay.

Colonists demonstrated a considerable interest in bunyips. Numerous accounts of them, their appearance, their habits and their place in aboriginal life, appeared in Australian newspapers over the following years. The stories and the samples of bunyip anatomy usually came from squatters of a certain "gentlemanly" type, individuals setting themselves up as a cultivated landed class. They knew a little about science and were happy to show off. The bush was a place of unplumbed mystery in which an eager observer with intellectual pretensions might find almost anything, and they did.

For the new city radicals and democrats, on the other hand, the bunyip was a splendid symbol of squatter foolishness. (W S Macleay belonged to a squatting family). In 1853, when the republican Daniel Deniehy invented the term "bunyip aristocracy", in one of our most famous public speeches, he conjured up a very sharp-pointed image. It was the image of an elite living in a dreamworld of its own, out of touch with the liberal democracy which he (rightly) thought was just around the corner, and with real life in Sydney and Melbourne. With a single stroke of oratorical genius he linked the colonial landed class with the apparently credulous and childlike aborigines. Both indeed were objects of radical contempt, because neither had anything to offer to "the coming man", the straight-backed, clear-thinking prototype of liberty.<Br>

Today "bunyip aristocracy" has different connotations from those which Daniel Deniehy made use of. Instead of dreaming uselessness, the term now means home-grown and counterfeit, and its original and much richer (and more richly bigoted) implications have been lost. Some of the more pleasant vestiges can be salvaged for our understanding of the bunyip monarchy.

Imagination has been cut short in other ways as well. When the bunyip aristocracy was born, the bunyip of common speculation died (or at least it radically dwindled). Public discussion ceased, and the bunyip was never again a reputable object of curiosity. Maybe that's a pity, because the questions which had been asked so far (Did bunyips really exist? What were they like? How did they differ from place to place?) were an early attempt by educated men and women to discover some of the hidden aspects of Australian and aboriginal experience. The exercise was a bit silly, no doubt, but it needn't have been wholly futile. Pure speculation, silly or not, is part of the essence of civilised life. Like democracy itself, it eschews inevitability and lives by surprise.

There's a moral here about talking and listening. Deniehy was a brilliant talker but there is no evidence that he was a good listener. The bunyip-believers were just the opposite. Whatever their faults, they did have ears. They patiently recorded the evidence of numerous aborigines, of "intelligent lads", and of odd individuals who brought in sun-bleached fragments from the bush. More than Deniehy they were eager for Australia's secrets. In a new land they quite rightly believed that it was a good idea to sit still and watch.

Careful listening brought the bunyip into existence. Brilliant talking frightened it away. What evidence is there now, in 1995, that Australia's bunyip monarchy will soon depart with equal finality? For a while, in 1991-3, it looked as if a few uncompromising flourishes, a few aggressive speeches, a few contemptuous newspaper articles, would force its disappearance overnight as an object of faith among Australians. But even now this can't be said to have happened. The monarchy continues to be sustained (but for how long?) by a peculiar, unyielding silence.

The resilience of monarchist commitment is gradually making itself obvious. Leading republicans began by ignoring it. In this regard they were like early Christian missionaries to the aborigines. Confident that nothing of value existed in the heads of their subjects, they were taken aback to find how hard that "nothing" was to budge.

By late 1994 the reality of the bunyip monarchy could no longer be denied. It's now conceded to be a living principle within the minds of numerous Australians. Judith Brett remarked in Arena Magazine in October-November on the "stubbornness" of the monarchists: "much to the chagrin of Australian republicans they refuse to bow to the inevitability of historical and demographic change." Frank Devine said much the same in the Australian on 2 February 1995: "there seem to be too many monarchists holding too firmly to their position to be explained by republican deceit, devotion to royal trappings or even a dislike for change". Until lately the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age used the deeply flawed Saulwick poll (allowing for headlines such as "Now seven out of ten back Keating's republic"). That seems lately to have abandoned, with much less lyrical results.

Australia's bunyips are implicitly surprising creatures, to be observed at unexpected moments grazing on the common imagination. In 1976 Les Murray published in Quadrant a piece in which he dwelt on what he called "the vernacular republic". The vernacular republic is, by my definition, a bunyip. It is wrote Murray, "inherent in our vernacular tradition, which is to say in that 'folk' Australia, part imaginary and part historical, which is the real matrix of any distinctiveness we possess as a nation." The vernacular republic is manifest in speech and writing. It makes itself obvious only when its audience sits still and listens up. Noise interference destroys, if not its life, then at least its power to surprise. It has fruitful dealings with monarchy (though Murray said the opposite in 1976) as I suggest below.

Leading republicans in the 1990s have been, like Deniehy, bad listeners. During 1993 the Prime Minister's Republic Advisory Committee toured various Australian towns to collect opinions about the republic. It was, surely, a vitally important part of their deliberations, and it might have been profoundly interesting as a means of picking up the nuances of debate among the mass of Australians. Nothing of the slightest value emerged. Two committee members wrote about the experience and both in contemptuous terms. For Malcolm Turnbull it only proved the shallow bigotry of everyone who disagreed with him. John Hirst makes slighting remarks about fellow republicans who raised their voices from the floor, and says nothing at all about those who disagreed with him more fundamentally.

In his little book published last year, A Republican Manifesto, Hirst opens with a succinct agenda. "There are many reasons for supporting the republic," he says, "but as the debate continues one reason becomes more and more compelling. Under a republic there would be no more monarchists." He quickly adds that "monarchists will not be suppressed. They will simply lapse into silence and forget their old attachment." He's partly right of course. Many supporters of the Monarchy would in time forget, but not as easily as he thinks. In a period of deep division (deeper I think, than some metropolitan writers seem to imagine) the declaration of the republic will be a time of bitterness for a considerable minority, including some of the most inarticulate and "ordinary" Australians. This is the dark side of the republican program. It makes the trumpet blast sound like a sneer.

The republic is a fascinating and logical project, but whatever the polls say beforehand, it seems possible that a majority of voters faced by a referendum on the subject, will prevent the very public triumph of one part of Australia over the other, just as they did, say, in the conscription referenda on 1916-17 and the anti-communist vote of 1951. Never mind national identity. Something much more profound, the spirit of the nation, will probably baulk at that. I'm arguing here on assumption.

At the same time, only the most narrowly reactionary supporters of monarchy can deny that the system is broken and needs attention.

The republican desire to put an end to the supporters of monarchy - to stop listening - goes back a long way. In colonial times, the monarchist voice was the roar of authority, and only brave men and women defied it. The efforts of Daniel Deniehy, John Dunmore Lang and other nineteenth-century republicans to shout down the empire were part of the early campaign for a new democracy, free of entrenched and hereditary privilege. Echoes of the same dream appear in Les Murray's 1976 piece, which was conditioned of course, by the coup of the previous year. To remove the Crown, says Murray, would be to life the lid on the vernacular republic. It would "release much energy and lead to a great deal of change". It would have a "catalysing and liberating effect on the national life". The voices of the people would find their apotheosis in the ultimate independence of the state. Here, certainly, is one of the golden threads in the story of Australian nationality.

It was a happy line of argument while the republic seemed remote. Now that the possibility of change looms large it proves, instead, to be fundamentally mistaken. Murray outlined two natural enemies of the vernacular republic: not only the old Establishment, but a new one (or new in 1976) which he described as "the Ascendancy", an elite which, he said, had "captured most of the education, much of the arts and much of the fashion in Australia". Today it would be natural to add, I think, most of the media as well. In the 1990s (contrary, it seems, to anything Murray expected) the Ascendancy is republican. In this way the vernacular republic, "the subsoil of our common life" as Murray calls it, faces its greatest threat from a project which Australians once thought would clothe it with a mantle of glory.

Such a conclusion follows not only from Murray's premises. It's obvious in the campaign for a republic. The methods of the Australian Republic Movement (a body shaped by the Ascendancy) are crass beyond belief, and they represent a striking betrayal of the idealism of earlier years. They've been spelt out with childlike and brazen pride in Marketing magazine, September 1994, under the heading "The Republic: The Sale of the Century". Better ideological and spiritual foundations may yet be laid for the future republic (surely they will) but there's no sign of the work beginning. (The debates on citizenship are not necessarily republican). Mr Keating still talks mainly in terms of refurbishing and corporate image of the nation, the letterhead and logo it shows to the world, and Poppy King, the Lipstick Queen, remains as the living epitome of the republican future.

A rich cultural life doesn't emerge from uniformity and the silencing of voices. It depends on surprise and on immediate contradiction, on vivid contrarieties. It springs from issues which are dazzling and puzzling and which live, in tangible form, from generation to generation. Milton wrote Paradise Lost as a convinced republican during a period of civil war, and yet Lucifer appears in it as a rebel against the ineffable monarchy of God. The same splendid tension appears in some Australian work. Tim Winton's book Shallows is partly about the inheritance of European culture in Australia, and the action is very lightly embraced by the prospect of a visit by the "Queen of England and her natty husband", as if to suggest that the Queen represents the living but highly problematic past. The central figure, whose name is Queenie, sums up the sharp intersection of past and present through being not only a descendant of pioneer whalers but also an angry activist, saving the lives of whales.

I'm sure that part of the cultural renaissance among Aborigines is a result of their having to deal, all at once, with a weighty inheritance and a suddenly prolific range of opportunity. Why should such contradiction be too much for the rest of us?

Inheritance, of whatever kind, is a powerful symbol of community. Family, birthplace, tribe and nation are a parcel of inheritance. As the ethical philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, has written, "These constitute the given of my life, my moral standpoint." The sense of "given", the concreteness of the past, is what Monarchy seems to stand for, although it ought to do so differently from generation to generation. This is the general theme of the poetry of Mary Gilmore, a quaint figure today, no doubt, but not quite irrelevant. Gilmore was radically concerned with the value of inheritance, whether it was embodied in the natural environment of the country, in its European past or in Aboriginal tradition. She spent her life dealing with the ancient forms of the vernacular republic. But she also wrote verse in which she thought about kings (Edward VIII and George VI, in particular) as symbols of order and regeneration, as the personification of society considered within the unyielding grid of time and space. Like Winton's Queenie, she was both an inheritor and activist. Her radical generosity grew from recognition that the battles between freedom and need are among the best battles of civilisation. Under this rubric, monarchy appears as a sharp focus of conflict.

The Australian republican movement has not been particularly strong on poetry, at least since Charles Harpur's time. In its current form it abhors contrariety. It labours for logic and uniformity. It also has nothing to say about the deep cultural significance of personification (the essence of monarchy), as a poetic technique in active use far beyond the circle of men and women who call themselves poets. I'd suggest - Les Murray would now, as he tells me, agree - that the hoped-for constitutional republic therefore has very little to say about the vernacular republic. Now, certainly, the enmity of principle which exists between the two is more absolute than anyone could have predicted.

Discussion of the future Head of State generally labours over three possible types. To some extent they overlap and compliment each other, but they also involve slightly different priorities. They are as follows:

1. The Arbiter. This figure is the main concern of lawyers and politicians, who are naturally interested in the way in which the constitution will be maintained. The Arbiter is envisaged sitting at the heart of the state, advising, consulting and warning, and interfering in rare moments of crisis.

2. The Mentor. The attributes of the Mentor-President have been spelt out lately by Robert Manne, who has perceived among Australians a "thirst for sober and wise reflection on fundamental questions affecting our national life", and who argues that a President, properly chosen, could help to satisfy that thirst. No doubt there is such a thirst in any civilised country. How far it needs to be slaked at one especially splendid fountain is another issue. A great deal would depend on speech-making and the "constituency" of the President would be made up mainly of those Australians who listen to speeches, our metropolitan dress-circle in particular.

3. The Networker. It would be hard to find any precise job description for this figure, but there can be no doubt that it exists in the minds of many Australians. I, for one, have grown up taking it for granted. Here is an image which depends on a particular idea of Australia, not in any sense as a corporation, nor even as an audience, but as a considerable land-mass supporting a scattered and diversely occupied population. The Networker is a figure distinguished by a highly conspicuous public profile, a very strong sense of duty, an ability to say the right thing (especially in the encouragement of voluntary effort) and a willingness to move about. It's the job of the Networker to walk along the backbone of the nation, to make manifest its hidden arteries and joints and to give it a vivid sense of itself as a living creature. In that sense the Networker, rather more than the Arbiter and the Mentor, represents the spirit of the nation.

The Networker is in fact the ideal we've always had, and why it should be so much out of fashion today is not clear. It's the old vice-regal model, and one which members of the royal family have also tried to use during their brief visits to Australia. If they haven't been entirely successful it's because they haven't lived here, and of course their visits have now ceased anyway (except for the Duchess of York). The achievement of vice-regal figures, for their part, have been hindered by their brevity of tenure and, perhaps, by their not being conspicuous enough.

These roles are each important, and in any future arrangement they'll need to be drawn together somehow within a single person, or personage. That individual's success depends, more I think than many commentators want to recognise, on the general support of Australians at large, or in other words on consensus.

What are the building blocks of such consensus? So far public opinion has been expressed mainly through polling. Each poll necessarily offers two or three neat options from which respondents have to choose, without necessarily understanding any as fully as they might. But the polls can also, indirectly, elicit the ideas which respondents themselves have in their heads. The latter procedure is, of course, far more valuable than the former, but it's also much more problematic. To some extent it works through an accumulation of polls asking a variety of questions, and the outcome is not at all clear-cut.

I have here tried to apply the skills of an historian to the polls which have been held on the republic. It seems to me that the following three ideas each has a body of support sufficiently large and profound to justify a place in the final scheme of things.

1. There's very decided opposition to the idea that successive Heads of State should be chosen by the Prime Minister, by Parliament, or (presumably) by any other select group of individuals consulting among themselves. Such opposition has been proved by massive support for the only obvious republican alternative, namely popular election.

2. There's a good deal of sympathy for the idea that the Head of State should be an Australian. This is by far the strongest theme of the republican campaign: whatever the mingled faults and virtues of the royal family, they are not Australian. (More precisely, they don't live here.) It also emerges from a Newspoll in March, which for the first time did not offer the options "republic versus monarchy", but rather "Australian versus the Queen". The new wording seems to have lifted the level of support for change (to 57 per cent). If we use strict logic, it has thereby demonstrated a new level of support for a republic, but strict logic is not the way forward in testing such a constellation of ideas. Individuals who say that they like the idea of an Australian Head of State won't necessarily say, on another occasion, that they want a republic.

3. The Monarchy has the positive support of at least a third of the population and about half will not at present put their hands up for its abolition.

Consensus, if we ever get it, will rest on these three pillars. Twenty years ago, when Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister, there was a deliberate effort, as Whitlam himself has explained, "to reinforce the Australian identity of the Monarchy". It doesn't figure largely in accounts of those years, but (as I've argued elsewhere) it was perfectly consistent with Labor tradition and it might well have borne useful fruit in due course. It rested on the spirit of radical and inclusive generosity which made many of us, who are now middle-aged, into Labor voters. It was, of course, aborted and even turned upside-down, by the dismissal of the Government. Labor's disappointment at the Queen's failure to intervene (which appears also in Les Murray's 1976 piece) explains some of the new momentum which was given to republicanism henceforth. Even so, Labor voters have never been whole-hearted for the republic: last year it was supported by as little as 56 percent.

The obvious alternative to the republic is to carry forward the Whitlam project, to pick up the frayed ends of the Australian monarchy, that bunyip institution in which many Australians still demonstrate considerable faith. It's the less dramatic alternative, and in abstract terms, less interesting. It will certainly be less appealing to Les Murray's Ascendancy. There's less about it of the Prime Minister's "defining moment". All of which makes the suggestion of revival, at first sight, startlingly unrealistic.

At first sight only. Should the republican proposal fail at a referendum it will be difficult for any government to leave the country in limbo, bruised and divided, until it can save up enough to try again. The same applies if there should be no referendum at all. There must be another way forward.

Australian republicanism goes back a long way. In the past it has drawn much of its strength from the vernacular republic, and under better circumstances it may well do so again. There was republican feeling in some of the colonies in the 1840s and early 1850s, just before the coming of democracy and responsible government. There were more considerable calls for a republic during the early debates which led to Federation. Republican feeling also surfaced during the 1930s, and it can be seen as part of the political realignment of those years, paving the way for the post-war constitutional changes (using "constitutional" in a very broad sense) associated with the names of Curtin, Chifley and Menzies. In short, republican feeling has usually been a symptom of deep questioning and rebirth, and in every case the outcome has been a useful adjustment of the position of the Crown in Australian life. The profound symbolic resources of the monarchy have been tapped as part of a process of renewal. The last substantial adjustment had its climax with the two-month visit of the Queen in 1954. am extraordinary event in a number of ways.

These episodes, spaced at half-centuries, each embodied a new contract with the Crown. If yet another arrangement is possible, now is certainly the time for it. As far as Australia is concerned the monarchy still has an antique, imperial aspect, even an aspect of divine right. It seems to take its life from a source beyond our control. Whatever hope there may be of maintaining it must aim at this deficiency. The only hope for the Crown is an Australian repeat of the Revolution of 1688. In short, it needs to be brought within the Commonwealth of Australians, to be shaped by Australian opinion and Australian priorities. Recent pro-republican changes to oaths, and so forth, might point the way also to a plainer, less overbearing monarchy. Such a change might loosen up discussion of the flag, and other, more profound constitutional issues. As a minimum (and maybe as a beginning) a senior member of the royal family would need to live here, as the Queen's personal representative. Her youngest son is the best and maybe the only possible candidate.

This would make no legal difference, at least for the time being. The Governor-General, as constitutional representative and, more profoundly, as an Australian among Australians, would still be the leading figure in the state, taking precedence on every occasion. In fact, the very presence of royalty would go a long way towards publicly subordinating the image of the Crown to local opinion and process. There's no other way of testing its future usefulness.

Many Monarchists are narrowly reactionary. Some republicans (including perhaps the Prime Minister) can only be described as fundamentalists. But look at South Africa. The divisions of apartheid have been much more serious than our divisions, but events there show that the genuine spirit of a nation can be well expressed by compromise, by a movement of startling tolerance which reaches across gulfs of principle. It's all about bringing rebirth out of decay, in an atmosphere best expressed by fireworks and trumpets. If the republican debate can result, by the year 2000, in a similar effusion of generosity, we'll certainly have something to celebrate.