Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In the days since Her Majesty's death, dozens of Kooyong constituents have contacted me to express their sadness and their sense of loss. What unites their views is the feeling that Queen Elizabeth was, to them, both a phenomenon, a symbol of modern history; and a person, a woman who assumed a role of great responsibility at an early age, who carried that responsibility throughout her adult life—a woman for whom most felt great respect and admiration.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II ruled for an extraordinary 70 years, a period of accelerating turbulence and seismic transition in our world. Her time on the throne saw a revolution in science, technology, industry, geopolitics and sociology.

When she was six years old a young Elizabeth told her riding instructor that she wanted to grow up to be a country lady with lots of horses and dogs. The circumstances of her birth were such that that could never be her future, but her love of the countryside remained and was transmitted into decades of advocacy for wildlife and the environment.

Australians in their 70s and older can remember when that 25-year-old English woman was suddenly thrust into the world's spotlight, placed on a 1,200 year old throne and crowned with the weight of history, the expectation and responsibility of a Commonwealth. Those older Australians grew up with Her Majesty. As they married and had children, so too did their Queen. As they moved through each stage of life experiencing love and loss, so too did their Queen. As they raised their children and their grandchildren, we learnt from them of a Queen that they felt connected to, a constant in their lives and then in our lives, whose steadfast stoicism was always there providing familiar comfort and calm.

For many Australians though this period of mourning the Queen cannot be separated from their own lifetimes of mourning—of mourning bloodlines and song lines—of land, language and children stolen. The persisting sorrow felt by many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as Australia pays tribute to our Queen cannot be denied. Those First Nations people were dispossessed of a land on which they had lived for tens of thousands of years through a declaration of terra nullius—nobody's land. We all share this history. We must all speak and hear our truths. And we must acknowledge our past if we are to move forward together.

During the COVID-19 pandemic Queen Elizabeth took to the BBC to speak to her millions of subjects. She told them:

… while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.

At that time of great anxiety her message was a metaphorical steadying hand on the shoulder of a people grappling with uncharted uncertainty and fear for their loved ones and for themselves.

One of her final speeches was less than a year ago at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference. Unusually, she used that address to appeal directly to political leaders who had gathered to act on climate change. She told them:

If we fail to cope with this challenge, all the other problems will pale into insignificance.

Her parting words have become more poignant with the passage of time, but they apply to the people of Australia and they are very relevant to us in this House:

None of us will live forever. But we are doing this not for ourselves but for our children and our children's children…

When Queen Elizabeth was crowned in 1953 the Australian House of Representatives had 124 members; none were women. The past is a foreign country. The Australia of 1953 is a very different Australia from that of 2022. The second Elizabethan age has seen the world change immeasurably. It has seen Australia achieve a new maturity which has, I believe, allowed us to recognise that this is the time to recognise all of our history and to move on together as a nation.

The people of Kooyong thank Queen Elizabeth II for her duty and for her service. Her death marks the end of an era. May we all reflect on her words, her example and her legacy as we embark upon the next.

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