Paul Keating recalls Queen Elizabeth II meeting at Balmoral and urges Australia to become a republic

Queen Elizabeth II met Paul Keating “alone, to her credit” in what the prime minister was informed was her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria’s, favourite room at Balmoral Castle.

“And I took some pleasure in explaining the furniture to her,” Keating recalls, an old elan breaking through.

“It was made of Karelian, Russian Karelian birchwood. She had kept all the green-and-blue tartan carpets, all worn, so the room had something going for it. But the thing is, what had nothing going for it was any relativity to Australia.”

Keating was in the UK to deliver his monarch a message, that Australia, Australians, “did not need her any more”. Australia should, must become a republic.

“She said to me in this conversation, rather plaintively, ‘my family and I do our best for Australia’, whereas what I was really offering was a way out.”

A file note written by Keating following the meeting re-affirmed his belief in Australia’s independent future.

“The hereditary nature of the queen’s position, the remoteness from any contemporary mandate, struck me at that moment, at that proximity, as so banal, even sad.”

Keating, Australia’s 24th prime minister, is in conversation Wednesday night with Sydney University professor of modern history, James Curran, author of Grand Ambition: Paul Keating’s Global Vision for Australia.

It is an adroitly drawn portrait of a past leader – Keating lost power 30 years ago – but one who remains firmly convinced his vision is still very much this country’s future. An Australia that finds its security in, rather than from, Asia, that will be a republic, that will finally walk the path to reconciliation with its indigenous history.

‘Timidity is like a virus’

“My view of the country was bigger than the country’s view of itself, but the vision will never deteriorate,” Keating says.

This evening, Curran reminds his audience (gently) that his interlocutor is no longer a young man, a child of the second world war (born 1944), who was just 25 years old when he entered parliament in 1969. Who cut his political teeth during the height of the cold war, and whose time as leader coincided with its end (once held up as the “end of history”).

Keating’s first remarkable month as prime minister took in the fall of the Soviet Union; the arrival on Australian shores for the first time in three decades of a US president (George HW Bush, whom Keating wanted to “put in a headlock” to get something from him – the result was Apec, now still a key leaders’ meeting on the multilateral calendar, deep in its fourth decade); and a visit from Her Majesty (still yet a couple of years from their awkward meeting at Balmoral).

Keating’s age is apparent.

The voice is a little weaker, raspier; the pauses – formerly used to such dramatic effect on the floor of the Reps – are a little longer; the quotes once-remembered now come through an aide-memoire.

But there is still the killer line, the rapier wit, blunted a little, but still penetrating.

“Timidity,” he tells Curran in their interviews for the book, “is like a virus in the bloodstream.”

Curran writes: “Keating’s central theme over the years is that the country has become afraid, and that its leaders have refrained from articulating a bigger idea of the place.

“Instead of long-term strategic thinking about the kinds of issues coming down the national and international track, he sees frenzied activity. His retort? ‘Busyness is not substance.’”

Australia suffers no shortage of political autobiography, for better or worse. Keating, famously/notoriously, has never put pen to paper in his own defence.

Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, a memoir by his speechwriter, Don Watson, was said to have wounded him. He saw it as a betrayal. In response to what he saw as yet another Hawke biography, Keating delivered a veiled threat: “If I get around to writing a book, I will be telling the truth; the whole truth.”

It never eventuated.

But throughout this conversation, and throughout Grand Ambition, it is apparent that Keating has always kept an eye on legacy, on his place in history, and on grand ambition, his own and the country’s.

‘Trump wants to do is avoid world war three’

He keeps, Curran writes, meticulous records of the policies he considers the signal markers of his time in office, “the pillars of his political legacy”.

For a historian of Curran’s forensic eye, exclusive access to these files is manna from heaven.

“Each folder contains the relevant primary cabinet documents and diplomatic cables and, where applicable, briefings to and from his advisers and department, records of what other ministers thought or wrote, details of critical conversations with other leaders, and a carefully selected array of newspaper articles.

“They are all stamped ‘PJ KEATING PERSONAL COLLECTION’, arranged in precise chronological order and stapled at top left. The stamp itself is a statement about more than just the provenance of the documentary record; it is asserting, in its own way, Keating’s ownership of that past.”

To end the evening, Keating is asked for his message for young Australians, and the future they will encounter and make. The key themes are still there: a republic, indigenous reconciliation, a fairer Australia “making housing more affordable is a great thing to be doing. And if we’ve lost 10 or 15% in house values, so what?”.

But there are still surprises too. Keating’s proclaimed support for the foreign policy of the current occupant of the White House – “what Trump wants to do is avoid world war three” – his existential concern over the rise of artificial intelligence: “which I think is going to be the greatest agency of change since the discovery of electricity”.

Keating is taken to a speech he gave at Kokoda. On Anzac Day in 1992, as prime minister, he had fallen to his knees and kissed the base of the memorial to fallen Australian soldiers, describing the PNG highlands village as “the place where the depth of the soul of the Australian nation was confirmed”.

“It is important for all of us, but particularly and especially young Australians,” Keating said that day, “to believe in an independent Australia, beholden to nobody. We can’t deny young Australians their birthright to a past with meaning for them and a future without meaning: it has to be a future with meaning.