When Australia Became a Republic

Australia became a republic many years ago—culturally, if not yet constitutionally. We’ve long stopped identifying as subjects of the British Crown, relying on UK military and trade relationships, and looking to London as our lodestar. We’ve long stopped allowing the UK Parliament to override our laws, accepting imported vice-regal representatives, and even hearing from our governor-general on days of national significance. We’ve long stopped singing ‘God Save the Queen’, and when the King visited last year, hardly anyone noticed.

Some of these have been natural evolutions, some politically imposed; all make the monarchy less and less visible in everyday Australia. For a multicultural federation on the sovereign lands of hundreds of First Nations, all of this makes good sense—but, like it or not, we remain a British realm. Our governments and indeed our democracy exist only at His Majesty’s pleasure, codified in a faulty constitution, and systematically incapacitating necessary reform.

In When Australia Became a Republic, Esther Anatolitis examines the key moments in our emergence as a republic, and maps out new paths to securing legitimate independence for a more honest society. These include ambitiously neutralising the toxicity that dominates our national conversation; venturous civics education for a new era of empowered citizenship; and of course, constitutional change—because monarchy and democracy are irreconcilable.