For the coronation of King Charles III, Australians can buy a T-shirt commemorating the event.
“Democracy Not Monarchy,” reads one of the offerings from the Australian Republican Movement. “One of Us. For Us. By Us.” says another.
“Keep the Crown” proclaims a shirt backing the status quo from the Australian Monarchist League.
As the death of his mother did, the coronation of King Charles has reanimated debate in Australia about its future governance, and the possibility the country might jettison the British royal family to become a republic.
Australia’s new high commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith, has said an Australian republic is only a matter of time.
“My personal view is it’s inevitable,” Smith told the Times this month.
“But how that’s progressed is entirely a matter for the Australian government of the day.”
Craig Foster, a former international footballer now head of the Australian Republican Movement – with something approaching a Gary Lineker-esque profile in Australia – has said he found it galling to watch an Australian prime minister sign a proclamation last year promising “faith and obedience” to the new king.
“It was just so ridiculous to have our elected leader pledging loyalty to someone who we don’t know, we don’t like and we don’t particularly respect,” he told an Australian interviewer.
King Charles’s coronation will take place on Saturday night Australian time: the pomp and pageantry will be restrained.
Over the coronation weekend, significant national buildings and monuments will be illuminated in royal purple. On the Sunday, a 21-gun salute will be fired from the forecourt of parliament house.
Two Australians will play official roles in Charles’s coronation at Westminster Abbey.
Simon Abney-Hastings is the 15th Earl of Loudon, an ancient Scottish title, and is a distant relative of the new king.
Abney-Hastings lives, usually quietly, in the small Victorian (state, not era) town of Wangaratta, and has been invited to be the bearer of the great golden spurs, an element of the ceremony instigated for the coronation of Richard the Lionheart in 1189.
And Sam Kerr, Chelsea striker and captain of the Australia football team, will carry the Australian flag: one of 15 flag-bearers representing the realms of the crown.
The Australian government will be represented at the coronation ceremony in London by the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, alongside the king’s representative in Australia, the governor general, David Hurley, and the governors of Australia’s states.
Australia will be further represented by, in the words of the prime minister, a group of its “outstanding citizens”, including musician Nick Cave (also a product of Wangaratta), and comedian Adam Hills.
Forty members of Australia’s Federation Guard – the ceremonial unit of Australia’s armed forces – will be part of the 4,000-strong procession leading the king back to Buckingham Palace after the Westminster Abbey coronation.
Australia will also play another – albeit minor – supporting role.
In a break from tradition, King Charles and Camilla, the Queen Consort, will proceed to the coronation in the Australian-made diamond jubilee State Coach, built in 2012, rather than the older, more uncomfortable Gold State Coach (which will return them to the palace).
But for those antipodean subjects of King Charles – he became King of Australia automatically at the moment of his mother’s death – there appears likely to be little fanfare.
No national public holiday has been declared for the Monday, and only one state, Western Australia, has said it will “consider” giving its royal subjects the day off.
Urging a national commemorative day, the Australian Monarchist League said a public holiday on 8 May would “no doubt be well received”.
“The public holiday would be an opportunity for Australians to both celebrate the beginning of a new era, but also an opportunity to relax and spend time with family and friends,” spokesperson Alessandro Rosini said.
The League also condemned as “neo-communism in action” the Australian government’s decision to exclude the new sovereign from the next $5 note. Queen Elizabeth II has featured on the note’s obverse since 1992. A new note will eschew King Charles III, instead featuring a design that “honours the culture and history of the First Australians”.
Albanese’s Labor government, not yet a year old, has appointed an assistant minister for the republic, and is forecasting a referendum on the question of an Australian republic if it wins a second term of government (prioritising, for its first term, an indigenous “Voice” to parliament).
But the Queen’s death, and her son’s instantaneous, unconsulted accession as King of Australia just four months after the new government was elected, has brought forward public debate over what sort of nation this is, and wants to be.
Part of the equivocation is around Charles himself, whom, polls have consistently shown, engenders less affection in Australian hearts than his mother did.
A survey run by the ABC in May 2022 found a slim majority of Australians – 53% – did not support Charles becoming king. An Ipsos poll run in the months after the Queen’s death found a narrow majority – 54% – of Australians supported cutting formal ties with the British monarchy. A stronger majority – nearly six in 10 – wanted a referendum on the Republic question.
But Australia, his new dominion, does carry some sentiment for the king. He spent a semester of his schooling at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus, in the rugged foothills of Victoria’s alps.
At one point he was even said to be enthusiastic about being appointed Australia’s governor general, an idea unpopular with both the Australian population and his mother.
Soon to be anointed the fifth king of Australia since federation, the question being asked about Charles III: might he be the last?
