republican

I remember exactly where I was when I became a republican, if not exactly when. By my reckoning it is 1964 and I’m walking down St Georges Road, Elsternwick. What juicy irony. For some reason I’m walking the east side of the street when I usually walk the west side. Just before Glenhuntly Road where I catch my bus I pass the RSL, flags fluttering.

The Australian flag is up there, so too the Union Jack. I don’t know my political leaning yet—Liberal or Labor—but think I might be Liberal because my parents are. Bob Menzies is prime minister and I admire him for reasons unknown to me now. He’s a staunch monarchist—“I did but see her passing by, yet I love her till I die”—but I know as I walk past that Union Jack that I am not.

An idea long lodged in my head, seeded where I know not, blossoms in that moment. Blossoms into sudden appalled anger that by birth, by some medieval assumption of special blood, someone in a foreign country regards me as her subject. Were she born in Elsternwick I would feel no different.

And so a determinedly independent mind, or mindset, takes root in me. My interest in Australian politics and what happens in our parliaments germinates. I attend a private school with all its conservative trappings. A revered year 9 English teacher, an American, takes my interest in language and multiplies it exponentially. He also preaches the US cause in Vietnam.

What I later recognise as a Calvinist streak colours my social thinking for a few years but when 1968 bursts in Paris and around the world I start to see things differently. By 1970 I’m superficially radicalised: I take no action, do not demonstrate or march or chant. But I think. Too much, according to one of my closest friends.

I learn to loathe the Liberal obsession with the economy, but am equally contemptuous of Labor’s possession by the unions. I lean heavily left but in a fiercely independent way.

In 1971 I refuse to register for national service, to fight for queen and country. I will never fight for a sovereign as my father did. It was king first and country second for him when he went to war aged 17 in 1942. I admire what he did but not why he did it.

I have not wavered since that afternoon in 1964. Today the British monarch celebrates 60 years on the throne and a million of her subjects (quote unquote on this morning’s ABC news bulletins) line the Thames to see her royal fucking arse float past on the royal fucking barge.

Well, fuck my brown dog!

Rock on.