The Queen and I: why she made this republican’s wish list of dinner party guests
True story: at our Cremorne Old Girls’ 80th birthday gathering, which I wrote about recently, we had fun sharing our thoughts on which three people we’d want at a dinner party. George Clooney was the man of the moment there, but when it came to my turn, I managed to resist him in favour of one of our old friends who was missing in action, Ronnie Kahn of OzHarvest – and whom, not being a monarchist, I proposed should be Australia’s first president.
Anne Ring, aged about seven, with younger sister Susette. CREDIT:BANDI WISE (THE GIRLS’ FATHER)
And so, why on earth was my third choice Queen Elizabeth II? As I explained, with her reputation for wit (in no small measure backed up by her recent encounter with Paddington Bear), I felt that after a couple of glasses of a good wine, she could be a fount of incisive observations about her lived-in history. Who else had known so many British prime ministers and world leaders about whom we could get the first-hand low-down.
And, as a matter of fact, in my childhood I had been a committed royalist from the time I arrived in Australia at the age of seven (from China, where I’d been born of Hungarian parents, but that’s a whole other story), and found that my newfound friends all had scrapbooks bulging with photographs of the British royals. In no time, thanks to The Australian Women’s Weekly and the other magazines featuring the young Princess Elizabeth and her family, I too had scrapbooks growing like Topsy.
For me, too, like so many excited school children around Australia, 1954 brought the thrill of coming face to face with her. As part of her visit, she had come all the way across the Blue Mountains, and in her open car she went past our assembled classes in Lithgow Oval, slowly enough for me to capture her with my box camera. That was a treasured photograph until I managed to lose it during one of our many moves.
Over the years, I became less of a royalist. And, unrelatedly, the magazines that had portrayed the royals with worshipful adoration gradually changed their tone to suit the times. And the times were seeking to turn the members of Britain’s royal family into just another bunch of celebrities whose lives and – hopefully – peccadilloes were rated on the basis of how many issues could be sold on the backs of ever more salacious and critical stories.
Their nadir seemed to be reached with the fatal results of paparazzi in pursuit of Princess Diana in Paris. But over the years, as memories of that faded, new victims have been found. The most popular ones, now, are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. None of us can know the truth behind the sad schism that has caused this split in the royal family, but it’s not for want of the media’s trying, and of exacerbating it.
We can only imagine the distress that this had brought the Queen, while at the same time Prince Phillip died and – so – she had to soldier on without the love of her life, while also having to endure the painful reality of the actions of her reputedly favourite son, Prince Andrew.
In a way, it could be said, all of this made her more relatable to people who’ve had to endure losses and conflicts within their families. And the way she, nonetheless, bravely soldiered on, only enhanced her reputation, and made her something of a role model, as she continued working with dedication at her lifelong occupation until her last days.
Now that she has died, and her son, King Charles III has taken over the reins, I like to think that – among all he has said since her death – it is in homage to her that he has held out an olive branch to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.