British Journalist, Catherine Bennett, asks the question as she reviews new tributes to the Queen of the United Kingdom and Australia exploding out of the Diamond Jubilee and ranging across her “abilities, wisdom, beauty, self-denial, endurance and devotion and that do not excude the physically superhuman”. Comparing Britons to the leader worship displayed by North Koreans, she wonders if they are almost as mad (what does that make us?). She describes the royal family as uncontaminated by ideas, ambition or democratic election and concludes “no one should mistake mass worship of Queen Elizabeth for the end of republicanism”. Quite right says WfaAR. [New Elizabethans? No, our triumphs owe nothing to her by Catherine Bennett, The Observer, 3 June 2012]
Woman for an Australian Republic, Adelaide Ironside, republican poet and artist 1831-1867
Self portrait 1855, Newcastle Art Gallery NSW
