Joe Hildebrand writes: How a republican became a royalist

THE little girl in the park was beaming like the unexpected Dubbo sun from underneath a plastic tiara.

“Why do you like Harry and Meghan?” I asked.

“Because she’s a princess!” the girl shone back.

“And would you like to be a princess when you grow up?”

“Yes!”

That should have been the final word in the modern republican’s arsenal.

“Well you can’t,” I should have told her.

“It’s a hereditary title and you’ve already been born so you’re too late.”

But of course that wouldn’t be entirely true. According to Elle magazine, there are now 13 eligible princes in the world, although one is technically not a prince and another is a prince of the Ottoman Empire, which ceased to exist approximately 100 years ago. So let’s call it eleven.

Meanwhile, according to the United Nations, there are 3.78 billion females in the world, which means that if you want to marry a prince your chances are approximately one in 343 million. So let’s not give up hope.

Still, it is a reasonably safe bet that the number of girls who want to be princesses and the number of girls who actually end up one are unlikely to correlate.

This only serves to confirm, were confirmation ever needed, that the whole idea of royalty is hopelessly absurd, indecent and unfair. The notion that a bunch of pompous inbreds are inherently superior to us – to the point that we are expected to flock to far-flung destinations just to catch a glimpse of their greatness – is by any rational measure a laughable delusion.

And yet the laughter I saw in Dubbo when Harry and Meghan visited this week was far from delusional.

This is a town that has been famously hit by the worst drought in half a century and infamously infected by the more sinister pestilence of ice. But don’t call it the ice capital of Australia: “Nah, that’s Wellington,” they say with a dry flick of the head to the town 50 kilometres down the road.

The point is they’re funny bastards here. The only problem is that recently they haven’t had too much to laugh about.

And that is where Harry and Meghan come in, two people who have absolutely no right to be famous and, by all accounts, would probably rather they weren’t.

Truth be told, Dubbo doesn’t really need a royal visit. As has been widely reported it has had plenty in the past – an ex-cop I spoke to joked that he lost count after 20.

Dubbo doesn’t need royals, it needs rain.

But just because you don’t need something doesn’t mean you don’t want it. Otherwise there would be no toys or teddy bears. Or tiaras.

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Some of the thousands who poured into Victoria Park had travelled hundreds of kilometres to be a part of history. Others had just wandered down the street for a bit of fun.

One bloke I spoke to was an ex-serviceman struggling with PTSD. He told me that meeting the world’s most dashing soldier meant a lot, but what really meant everything to him was the dog at his feet that had calmed his nerves and quieted his mind.

A woman I spoke to was a strapper who’d met Prince Charles on his visit in 1981 and now, four decades later, had come back to meet his son.

There was a bunch of people from the disability services group Challenge who had made their own paper crowns. I have never seen grown men so happy.

And there were Indigenous tweens proudly wearing shirts emblazoned with the Aboriginal flag, stilt-walkers wandering around for no apparent reason, a mother and daughter from Orange who had forgotten the wine.

None of them had anything much in common and yet all of them were exactly the same as every one of the thousands of random humans gathered on the sprawling grass in one critical respect. All of them were smiling.

All of them were happy.

And then, as the royal couple finally reached the town that had been waiting for them for so many hours and waiting for water for so many months, it happened. The heavy clouds rolled in and the heavens broke. It rained.

I am the last man to be a royalist. I believe in equality over excellency, proficiency over privilege, meritocracy over monarchy. I believe in rationality and reason.

But what I saw in the heartland of the dry western plains of New South Wales made me believe in something else. Something like happiness. Something like togetherness.

And whether that was due to royalty or show business or some other sleight of hand hardly matters in the end. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what it really is. Sometimes just the belief itself is enough.

Indeed, the royals themselves may as well be a figment of imagination. The truth is that in my whole 24 hours in Dubbo I never once even laid eyes on Harry and Meghan. The only people I saw were the ordinary men and women of Australia.

And they are royalty enough for me.

— Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten and is editor-at-large for news.com.au. Continue the conversation on Twitter @Joe_Hildebrand

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