Monarchy

As I write this review, Stan Grant’s name is everywhere as the media and the public absorb his decision to step aside from compèring ABC Television’s Q&A after citing the cumulative wear and tear on him and his family of weeks of online racist abuse. Yet such is the pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that by the time this review appears, another episode in the seemingly never-ending racist diatribe against Australian First Nations peoples will have moved Grant off the front pages. The ‘trolls of the Twitter sewer’, as Grant calls them, will have found another target for their hatred and aggression.

Dennis Altman recently published a slice of autobiography, Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist, addressing ‘his long obsession with the United States’. Now, as if to remind us that his training has been in political science, Altman presents us with this lively survey of monarchies old and new, constitutional and absolute, European and Asian. It has its origins in the Economist democracy index, according to which seven of the ten most democratic nations were constitutional monarchies. The list is dominated by the Scandinavian kingdoms, with Norway at the top, and former dominions of the British Empire, with Australia just scraping into the list at equal ninth with the Netherlands. As a committed republican, Altman was set thinking by this apparent alliance of monarchy and democracy.

It is fitting to compare the longevity of the Queen Mother’s life with a magnificent hand-woven carpet running along a length of parquet down a torch-lit ancestral hallway: she was the embodiment of the twentieth century precisely because her life more or less spanned it. She was born on 4 August 1900 and (allowing for a bit of overhang into this century) died on Easter Saturday, 30 March 2002.