Preface: points of departure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
In 1995 the Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, formally announced his support for an Australian Republic. In the course of his speech to the House of Representatives he rejected Monarchy and other formal survivals of empire. His only concession to the European and British past was ‘that the Australian republic retain the name “Commonwealth of Australia”’. ‘“Commonwealth” is a word of ancient lineage which reflects our popular tradition and our Federal system’, he said.
More recently a leading Australian novelist, David Malouf, who is of Lebanese-Irish extraction, expanded on Prime Minister Keating's theme. ‘Any argument for [a republic] based on the need to make a final break with Britain will fail,’ wrote Malouf. This is ‘not because people want to preserve the tie but because breaking it is neither here nor there. The republic will be accepted because we need, as a society, to reinforce our bonds with one another, not break our bonds elsewhere’:
bonds of affection and concern that celebrate the gift of one another's presence and make the community one, as Federation, a century ago, made the continent and the nation one. And we will use for this notion of res publica the good old English word “commonwealth”, as our founding fathers did, rather than the Frenchified “republic”. Nothing very terrible has ever happened under a commonwealth. The same cannot be said for a republic, as many newer Australians, who are pretty familiar with their own histories if not with ours, have good reason to recall.'
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- A Commonwealth of the PeoplePopular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649, pp. x - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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