The Robert Menzies Institute is saddened by the news of the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Australia’s monarch, and Head of State. Sir Robert Menzies was a firm believer in the strengths and successes of Australia’s constitutional monarchy, but what came to mean even more to him was the personal connection that he developed with the Queen herself.

Menzies attended Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1953. He hosted her as the first reigning monarch to visit Australia during the 1954 Royal Tour, a unique cultural phenomenon which saw as many as three-quarters of Australia’s population come out to see their young Queen. In her two months travelling, the Queen traversed much of the continent, visiting large cities, small country towns, landmarks, and everyday events which showcased the best of what Australia had to offer. She would return in 1963, leading the celebrations for Canberra’s 50-year jubilee.

As Menzies experienced his record-setting stint as Prime Minister, he became a mainstay of Commonwealth meetings headed by the Queen, and eventually emerged as the senior figure in attendance. In 1963 he was rewarded for his dedication with a Knighthood in the Order of the Thistle, a unique honour originating in 1687 and acknowledging Menzies’s Scottish roots, which no other Australian had ever received. Then in 1965, even more remarkably, he was appointed to the ceremonial position of Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a 900-year-old posting previously held by Sir Winston Churchill and later to be held by the Queen Mother.

That posting ensured that after his retirement in 1966, Menzies still had several engagements with Her Majesty. As late as March 1977, a year before Menzies’s death when he was already quite ill and frail, the Queen knighted Menzies in the new Order of Australia. This occurred in the Long Room of the Melbourne Cricket Ground while the Queen was attending the Centenary Test. Menzies was not fond of the new Australia-specific honours established by Gough Whitlam, but he accepted one ‘so that I will not be felt to let down the good and decent Australians who do not happen to have my inherited ideas about honours from the Crown’.

Today millions of these ‘good and decent Australians’, regardless of how they may have voted in the 1999 republican referendum, mourn the passing of a remarkable woman who had an undeniably special connection with our country