I’m glad to honour Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, as she is formally ‘styled and titled’ in Australia. I very much agree with Helen Pringle’s reasons which the Queen is a person worthy of respect by monarchist and republican alike.

Private faces in public places, according to the poet W.H. Auden, are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places. Queen Elizabeth never shows her private face in a public place, it is often claimed. …

Queen Elizabeth is someone who is immersed in duty and tradition, and someone who takes them very seriously indeed. She suffers, if that is the word, from an almost Roman sense of duty in public service. That is, she conveys a sense that public service requires a person to subordinate her own songs and desires to something a little greater. For that I admire her.

My admiration is not for the Queen as the monarch of Australia. I am a republican. Rather I admire the Queen as one of the few upholders of the value of reticence in public life. Far too often, this reticence is read as the outward sign of a stunted emotional life, lived by a woman who has been taught from birth to repress or to silence her emotional self. …

[B]ecause Queen Elizabeth does not usually put her emotions on public view, it does not follow that she has none. On the contrary, she is to me a more interesting person for being restrained in public. When Diana died, the Queen in her message to the nation said, “We have all been trying, in our different ways, to cope”.

There is something very touching and respectful in this sensibility. The implication seems to be that our intimate lives have a delicate fragility that needs some shelter of privacy in order to flourish. A further implication is that our emotions are easily corrupted by the full glare of public scrutiny, fed by those who have a passionate desire to publicise anything that comes to their mind. …

[W]e have come to gauge the emotional temperature of people like the Queen by how readily they emote in public. This seems to me to be a case of sheer emotional bullying. Public faces in private places may not be very nice, but I don’t think that private faces in public places are necessarily very wise at all.