In his Address-in-Reply, Prime Minister Robert Menzies acknowledged that the Address:

… [was] the signal for the greatest, most moving and enduring unanimity that this Parliament has ever seen. By our Address [to the Queen] we recognize our homage and the duty of our allegiance, but we desire to express much more than that – our love, our pride and our thankfulness to God that, whatever troubles may beset the world, and however man may be set against man in unhappy parts of the world, we of the great British family are privileged to live in unity under a young and lovely Queen, a great Queen to-day but one who is bound to be greater and greater as the years move on.⁷

On his return from the Korean War, official war artist Ivor Hele was commissioned to paint the 1954 opening of Parliament by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Hele was buoyed by the challenge and commented that ‘it offers a tremendous lot of problems and I love problems of that kind’.⁸  Prior to the ceremony, which lasted only 20 minutes, Hele visited the Senate chamber to choose his vantage point. He chose the corner, close to where William Mclnnes worked in 1927 when he painted the inaugural opening of Parliament by the then Duke of York. To overcome the challenge of recreating the scene, Hele made dozens of sketches of the Senate chamber and also sketched many individual portraits of important figures who attended the event, including Prime Minister Robert Menzies and his wife Dame Pattie, and President of the Senate Alister McMullin. The final painting was well received with reports that it held ‘great gusto and strength of characterisation — an unusual achievement in official pictures of this kind’.⁹

The following morning, the Queen presided over a meeting of the Federal Executive Council, where she signed her assent to the Flags Act 1953. The Act, which enabled the transition from Union Jack to an Australian national flag,¹⁰ remains one of the few examples of an assent signed by the Sovereign rather than a Governor-General.

The Royal Visit and Canberra

In 1954 the national capital was a city of just over 30,000 people,¹¹ almost half of whom were directly employed in the Commonwealth public service.¹² Though a nucleus of almost 2,000 people was established in Canberra by 1930,¹³ development had stalled with the onset of the Great Depression.¹⁴ World War II only compounded this, as the government’s core functions were consolidated in Melbourne and its finances, labour and materials focused on national defence.¹⁵ These constraints continued into the post-war years, so much so that at the time of the royal visit, a third of all the Commonwealth public service remained in Melbourne due to Canberra’s critical housing and infrastructure shortages.¹⁶ Not until the late 1950s would the pace of Canberra’s development accelerate, and make the capital more than ‘a few disjointed suburbs on either side of the future Lake Burley Griffin site’.¹⁷

After decades of relative stagnation, the royal visit refocused the nation’s attention on its capital city. Canberra rolled out a grand program of events for the royal party, with some 30,000 visitors flocking to the capital to see the Queen and the Duke. The single largest group incorporated approximately 17,000 children from all over the Southern Tablelands, including 50 Indigenous children from Wreck Bay, who attended Manuka Oval for the Children’s Assembly.¹⁸ The Queen’s and the Duke’s packed program included a tour around Canberra, a public reception, the opening of University House at the ANU, an investiture and garden party at Government House, troop reviews, a state banquet and ball, visits to Cuppacumbalong Homestead and the Australian War Memorial, a veterans’ gathering, the opening of the Australian–American Memorial, and presentation of a Royal Charter to the Australian Academy of Science.¹⁹


Young fans welcome Queen Elizabeth II on her arrival at Fairbairn Airfield, Canberra, 1954. Courtesy of the National Archives of Australia (A1200,L25136).

The Royal Visit and Australia
The royal couple’s eight-week Australian visit was the longest leg of their six-month travel across the Commonwealth, with the Australian Government’s share of the costs an estimated £510,000 ($18.2 million in 2021 costings).²⁰ Overall, the trip spanned 44,000 miles (71,000 kms) and encompassed 13 countries across the West Indies, Australasia, Asia and Africa. It would be Queen Elizabeth II’s longest-ever Commonwealth tour.²¹

The visit garnered intense media interest across Australia as radio, newsreels and newspapers chronicled the royals’ progress. Travelling 27,000 miles (43,000 kms) by air, rail, sea and road, the Queen and Prince Philip attended more than 250 formal engagements in 57 towns and cities across every state and the ACT.²² It is estimated that nearly three-quarters of Australia’s population saw the royal couple at least once during the tour, testament to the depth of the nation’s devotion to the Crown and affection for the young Queen.²³ Prime Minister Robert Menzies declared:

… for our Queen we have within us, sometimes unrealised until the moment of expression, the most profound and passionate feelings of loyalty and of devotion.

… when eight million people spontaneously pour out this feeling they are engaging in a great act of common allegiance and common joy which brings them closer together and is one of the most powerful elements converting them from a mass of individuals to a great cohesive nation.

In brief, the common devotion to the Throne is a part of the very cement of our whole national structure.²⁴

Since the 1954 visit, the Queen visited Australia another 15 times. As part of this, she opened federal parliamentary sessions on 28 February 1974 and 8 March 1977.²⁵