Pomp, circumstance and a right royal anachronism

This was published 12 years ago

Pomp, circumstance and a right royal anachronism

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FROM 1905 until the late 1950s, Australia, like many other colonies and former colonies of Great Britain, held a public holiday to commemorate Empire Day. It was a celebration of this country's commitment to the glory of empire and an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the strong ties of blood, culture, language, history and trade with Britain. But times changed and in 1958 Empire Day was renamed Commonwealth Day, and the official holiday was withdrawn due to lack of interest and relevance and has now rightly faded into obscurity.

However, the colonial mentality that underpinned what once was an annual expression of this country's subservient relationship with the British monarchy persists, and is reflected in today's public holiday to celebrate the birthday of this country's head of state, Queen Elizabeth II. Curiously, it is not even the Queen's real birthday, April 21, a day that is inconvenient for this nation as it falls only four days before Anzac Day and the commemoration of our war dead. April 25 is a day that most Australians, whether monarchist or republican, regard as more important than the birthday of whoever happens to sit on the British throne at the time.

Indeed, as the depth of feeling accompanying Anzac Day seems to grow more profound each year with younger generations embracing the sacrifice of their forebears, the Queen's Birthday holiday, in comparison, seems to become more irrelevant - beyond the opportunity for another day off work and the chance to get way for a long weekend before the dreary onset of winter.

That Australia's observance of the Queen's Birthday has become a pointless anachronism is reinforced by the fact that even the British no longer consider the occasion worthy of a public holiday. In Britain, where the monarchy remains a potent institution, the event is marked with pomp alone - a 21-gun salute during Trooping the Colour in St James' Park, but no day off for the loyal subjects.

What the Queen's birthday does give Australians is another opportunity to reflect on the implications of our continued constitutional ties with the British monarchy and the message that this sends to the rest of the world - and particularly to the Asia-Pacific region where we live - about our professed maturity and independence as a nation.


Australia is now a country vastly different from the outpost of empire that was its foundation, a country that looks predominantly to its immediate neighbourhood for its prosperity and to the United States for its security, and one whose blood ties with the former mother country have been irrevocably thinned by the waves of migration that have washed over our shores since the end of World War II.

When those immigrants become Australian citizens, they now pledge allegiance to Australia, not to the Queen. Even the honours that are bestowed on Australians today are no longer imperial honours. So why should they continue to be announced on the Queen's birthday and be presented by the Governor-General, the Queen's representative in Australia? This is inappropriate and untenable for a multicultural nation for which role of a remote sovereign in the daily lives of most if its citizens is negligible.

The Queen's birthday holiday remains a symbol of an Australia that no longer exists. It warrants a renewed debate about whether it should be abolished or replaced with a day that carries more resonance with the people of this nation as they chart a course through the formative years of the 21st century.

But more than that, the Queen's birthday holiday gets to the heart of what it means to be Australian today, when only a minority of the population can relate to the redundant symbols and trappings of monarchy and colonialism, when most would prefer to swear allegiance to the country they live in rather than to one half a world away, and when young people are more likely to find meaning in attending the dawn service at Gallipoli than in doffing their hats to mark the fictitious birthday of a distant monarch.

Today's Queen's birthday holiday can provide an opportunity to reflect on whether it is time to revisit the many arguments for the establishment of a republic that would, among other things, liberate this nation from the colonial time warp. However much affection there might be for the Queen herself, the monarchy she embodies no longer provides a unifying symbol for contemporary Australians in all their splendid racial and cultural diversity. As a first step, the Queen's birthday should be relegated to the same historical dustbin as Empire Day.

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