In town halls and social media groups, New Zealand’s most committed royalists are planning high teas, concerts, and watching parties. For the most dedicated, the memorabilia will be out on display: tea sets and replica tiaras, lifetime collections of Woman’s Weekly front pages and special edition photo books. For others, however – including some of the country’s dedicated royal watchers – the coronation cupcakes and cucumber sandwiches come with a side of doubt, over the future of the monarchy and the changing way that it is viewed in colonised countries.
Elizabeth Garlick will watch the coronation live, late into the night, with a group of other royal fans who are planning wine, cheese, and possibly tiaras. She says she fell in love with the royals as a small child, seeing princess Diana in the news, and over time became a “royal watcher” – keeping track of major events in the monarchy’s timeline. “I grew up in a family of other royal watchers – my great aunties, my great nana has [the queen’s] coronation on vinyl,” she says. “For me, this is like a once in a lifetime – a historical moment.”
Even for the ardent royal watchers, however, recent years have brought tensions over the monarchy to the surface – for Garlick, those include questions around race and the treatment of the Duchess of Sussex, as well as considering the legacy of colonisation. Over time, Garlick says, the Windsors have come to seem “more institution than family”.
“You just learn more things and it’s as if the magic of it all is gone,” she says. “You can see it elsewhere across the Commonwealth as well … a lot of looking back at colonisation.”
Claire Carnegie, of Timaru, says while she is not an out-and-out royalist fan – “some people get a bit obsessive” – she has always kept track of the royals. “My whole life, the queen has been there,” she says. “I remember going into Christchurch City as a little girl in the 60s and it was really exciting when the queen drove past.”
Carnegie says she will tune in to the coronation with a mixture of fascination at the spectacle and speculation about how much of a place the monarchy has in New Zealand’s future. “There’s a lot of history, especially regarding colonisation, and how it played out for Māori,” she says. “As time evolves, there’s going to be a lot more talk about the place of the Commonwealth.”
‘So many contradictions’
The crowning of a new king is expected to pass relatively quietly in New Zealand: no public holiday, no mass parades, no flag-waving hordes. As coronation planning begins to seep into talkback radio discussions and newspaper headlines, however, there are questions of whether it will prompt a wider consideration of colonial legacy in Aotearoa. “I haven’t heard much discussion on the coronation … [other than] discussing the coronation quiche as an underwhelming choice for the Coronation signature dish!” says Dr Helene Connor, Head of the School of Māori and Indigenous Education at University of Auckland. “Thinking about Māori and monarchy, though, there are so many contradictions inherent in this relationship with Aotearoa, as a former colony of the British empire,” she says. “Despite the effects of colonisation, many Māori remain loyal to the British monarchy and have an expectation that Queen Victoria’s descendants will honour the Treaty [of Waitangi] as a Treaty partner.”
King Charles occupies a complex role in New Zealand politics and history – as a primary guarantor of indigenous rights and sovereignty under the treaty of Waitangi, as well as the institution responsible for its breaches.
That institution “has in the past asserted authority over Māori… confiscated lands, acted in ways which have been inconsistent with the guarantees of Te Tiriti [the treaty of Waitangi],” says Dr Carwyn Jones, lead academic in Māori laws and philosophy at Te Wānanga o Raukawa. “Although we might think of King Charles as not having been personally responsible for that, he still sits within that whakapapa [genealogy] – and … I don’t mean just literally as a family, but in terms of the history of the institution of the crown,” he says.
“I think there’s still the question of reckoning with that,” Jones says.
The nature of that reckoning is still to be defined. A growing number of New Zealanders are aware of the darker parts of colonial history – thanks in part to formal state apologies and political settlements for violence, atrocities, and land confiscations by the crown – so those issues are at the forefront of many people’s minds. But New Zealand has not expressed strong appetite for republicanism: a 2022 Reid Research poll asked whether New Zealand should become a republic when Queen Elizabeth’s reign ended: 48% said no, and 36.4% yes.
And even as the country gradually reconsiders its view of the crown as an institution, some fascination remains – with the ceremony, the formalities, the machinations of seating plans and invitees.
“It’s still an historic event, the king is the king – and I’m quite fascinated by the ceremony attached,” Carnegie says.
“They do it best the Brits, you know, the pomp and pageantry,” says Garlick. “We want to see tiaras – we want to see a spectacle.”
