Flowers and tributes for the late queen at the gates of Hillsborough Castle (Image: PA/Brian Lawless)

Not sure if you noticed, but there’s been a story going round over the weekend, filling up our programming and our publications: Australia’s head of state has changed. 

That should be news, right? Historical, even. And sure, it was. Briefly — a “huh, fancy that” moment for an hour or two on Friday morning. 

Here’s the catch: it’s a big historical event hollowed out of any historical meaning. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature. To paraphrase The Who: “Meet the new king, same as the old queen.” What changes does it portend? Nothing. Nothing at all.

We’re left with the oddest of news moments. Its meaning is small, but the event seems so large that it demands of the news media, as Shakespeare has his deposed Richard II say, to “sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings”.

Here’s the second catch: as the English monarch as a person has shrunk into all signifier and no signified, there are too few stories, sad or otherwise, to tell: she was there a long time, she met a lot of people, went to lots of places as the world changed around her.

The moment demands that the only significant impact on history of her 70-year reign — the egging on of the 1975 dismissal by the Palace — go unremarked.

As our lead mourner, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did his best: “She was a constant … When she first visited here back in 1954, it was a different Australia, but on that visit, she went to almost 60 cities and towns, right around Australia.” Great. Thanks for that.

To fill the gap, weekend programming has put the out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new administrative and ceremonial processes of the British state on high rotation as “history in the making”. 

The family rituals of those of the monarch’s children still able to be seen in public hurrying to the bedside. The traditional signals of flags at half-mast. The community mourning of flowers heaped up outside. Even the very modern intrusion of social media with announcement by tweet.

And then the hurrying on of the new, with the time-consuming 20th-century public broadcasting ceremony of the ascension of Charles, looking like a new boy at school in a uniform a size or two too large, laid out in the confidence that he’d grow into it. 

In Australia, it’s the first transition since the Whitlam government’s Royal Styles and Titles Act determined that the English monarch’s sovereignty over Australia was held in parallel — not subservient to — her other sovereignties. 

The result? We get to ritualise our own administrative procedures in a more prosaic announcement of our first King of Australia under the act. And we get a public holiday which, in Victoria at least, will deliver a four-day weekend, coinciding with the more significant ritual of the AFL Grand Final.

The monarchy is a generations-long reminder that life imitates art. So just as, in series after series of Netflix’s The Crown, we absorbed easily the fictional continuity of the character of Elizabeth performed by different actors, so we’ll seamlessly slide through the continuity of the Crown whether it’s worn by the 96-year-old mother or in renewal by the 73-year-old son. 

Presenters have been left flailing around, searching for journalistically meaningful signs of historical change in faces embossed on coins or in marveling at the jarringly anachronistic cry: “God save the king!”

It wasn’t meant to be like this. The comforting myth Australia’s republicans have told themselves since the defeat of the 1999 referendum has been: just wait until the queen dies. Now we’re finding that you can’t wedge historical change into a moment that has been designed over generations to ingrain historical continuity.

It was a desperate attempt to find an apolitical route to political reform, repeating the 1990s fail when it was dressed up as part of the politics-free modernisation project of “growing up”, with a footy-chant side-serve of “one of our own”.  

Here’s the hard truth for Australian republicans silenced by the power of regal ceremony: every country that has broken with the English monarchy, from Ireland in 1937 through to Barbados just last year, has got there through the hard organising politics of the decolonisation struggle. It’s the same imperative that gives the Voice to Parliament such meaning in Australia. 

By the time Australia gets to vote on a republic — perhaps in the next parliamentary term — monarchy will be a lonelier status. Most of the eight remaining Caribbean monarchies will be following Barbados, likely starting with Jamaica and Belize followed by the Bahamas, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda and Saint Kitts and Nevis. 

That shift will impact thinking in the remaining Pacific island monarchies: Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. 

But are the settler nations — Australia, New Zealand, Canada — ready to embrace these hard politics of decolonisation? Or will we hanker to hang on to the comfortable second-hand semiotics of continuity and ceremony that the English monarchy holds out?