The British monarch long played an odd role in Australia’s media: through the gift of knighthoods and heraldic honours, it lent an imperial legitimacy that institutionalised the nation’s newspapers while transforming its rambunctious media barons into a bunyip aristocracy of sirs and ladies.
The old Fairfax, of course, went furthest, with three generations of knights ending only with the deaths of Sir Warwick in 1987 and Sir Vincent in 1993. To mark Fairfax’s 150th anniversary, halfway through the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it persuaded the College of Arms to recognise both the company and its major mastheads with their own antipodean heraldic arms.
Not just the Fairfaxes of course: there were knights and ladies among Melbourne’s Symes and Sydney’s Packers and the founder of the Murdoch newspaper dynasty, Sir Keith Murdoch.
It was Sir Keith’s son, Rupert, who disrupted the cosy practice. An apparent small-r republican, he eschewed the honour that had been a matter of course for media owners of his status in both Australia and England, tossing out the industry’s royal underpinnings.
The Fairfax company returned the royal favour. Back in 1980, as the Fairfax papers went through their last great print transformation under the guidance of its first journalist senior executive, Max Suich, it cast around for some sense of editorial guidance of what it believed in. It tossed in a commitment to “constitutional monarchy”.
Seemed cautiously safe at the time. Visiting royals were still being called on to grace this bridge or that building. The Fraser government had restored knighthoods to the Whitlam government’s Order of Australia. The palace letters revealing the interventions by the queen’s staff in the 1975 Dismissal were still safely confidential.
It positioned the paper at the institutionally sensible centre, much safer than the already republican-curious Murdoch and Packer media.
Trouble was that the sensible monarchic centre was about to be torn apart, and by the media themselves. While the 1981 marriage of then prince Charles and Diana marked the high point in monarchic popularity — in the UK and here in Australia — it marked the moment, too, when the royals became churned up in the celebrity maw that provided so much of the mass media content for at least the next quarter century.
It turned each individual royal — other than the queen herself — into rolling caricatures of evolving social trends. While the political conceit of constitutional monarchy has always made the monarch all signifier, suddenly just what was being signified shifted.
The monarch and her family at one time stood for the stable institutionalism of the parliamentary political project. But suddenly, one by one, chewed over by celebrity culture, they were broken out as individuals, each coloured in to represent one part or another of the roiling disruption of the modern world: Philip, the cranky old uncle, frustrated with the diversity of now; Charles, the unfaithful husband; Andrew, the grubby underbelly of the playboy lifestyle.
Now we have Harry fighting the British media’s attempt to determine his own shape — all but screaming out Elephant Man-style, “I am not a signifier!” — while William (with the help of Kate) is trying to squeeze the family back into a more suburban version of 1950s-style constitutional institutionalism.
For the media, it’s been 40 years of good fun — and good value for those who could shape their journalism around it, like the British red-tops or Australia’s women’s and celebrity magazines. All good fun, that is, until someone gets killed in a car crash. The death of Diana put the game on pause — but not for good. Not even for very long.
The royal family were fair game in a way that other celebrities were not. They were paid good money, after all, just for the job of being symbols. Why shouldn’t the media determine just what they stand for?
As Harry and Megan are finding out, as the last celebrity royals standing, it’s even truer now that other celebrities are using social media to tell their own stories. As the Nine mastheads demonstrated with their reporting on Rebel Wilson earlier this year, it’s time for journalism to let gossip journalism go.
Now the question is: how will it be played now the queen no longer delivers the ballast to hold the entire show upright?
So demanding is the narcissism of celebrity gossip that when news media can’t obsess about the royals it has to obsess about itself?
with all deference to Mr Grundle – this is the only thing the royals are good for, providing a slightly elevated version of The Real Housewives of Windsor so that “quality media” had something to counter program against the latest Hollywood couple’s implosion
The English royals are somewhat irrelevant to Australian politics, except when they interfere
If the main royals don’t engage in social media & get down in the gutter with the masses they should be able to continue as usual. Familiarity could well be their Achilles heel – as Harry & Meghan are destined to discover by seeking a high profile.
Thanks for this issue. It’s such a relief to read informed, thoughtful insights from both Crikey commentators and their readers on what is undoubtedly a unique day irrespective of your political leanings and demographic.