THE NAKED CITY – LET’S HEAR IT FOR QUEEN VICTORIA!
Bah humbug, Queen Elizabeth II and her recognition as Britain’s longest serving monarch. Sure she has just overtaken her great great grandmother Queen Victoria, but the latter deserves far greater accolades–particularly when it comes to we Sydneysiders. After all, this city is defined by old Queen Vic. Her statues abound and the Queen Victoria Building (affectionately the QVB) stands proud and defiant in a CBD beset by concrete blandness.
And what do we have to remind us of the current Queen? No doubt a scattering of fancy plaques that have been unveiled over the years, but nothing as monolithic as the imposing statue of Victoria, a great heaving blob of bronze that greets visitors to the Druitt Street entrance to the QVB. And just behind Victoria, complete with a recorded message from John Laws, is the poignant statue of her faithful mutt Islay.
“Hello, my name is Islay. I was once the companion of the great Queen Victoria. Because of the many good deeds I have done for deaf and blind children, I have been given the power of speech.”
For years, Sydneysiders have delighted at this improbable canine greeting, and whilst some are unnerved that the voice belongs to John Laws, at least be grateful that it’s not Rolf Harris. Of course it’s almost unthinkable that a similar honour would be bestowed on the current Queen’s mangy bunch of stumpy legged corgis, once they collectively kick the bucket. A pack of talking Royal corgis, preserved in bronze–not the sort of thing we’d want to see in town, a Lawsie voiceover or not!
What worries us more about the present day adulation for QEII, is the ongoing bad rap attached to Queen Victoria. For years she has been portrayed as humourless, overly melancholic and defiantly aloof following the death of her beloved Prince Albert, with whom she bore a remarkable nine children. That she bravely survived an attempted assassination during her first pregnancy, as well as a series of later attacks, is often overlooked. What we probably do remember is the old howler that she decided not to ban lesbianism, because she assumed that it did not even exist. The reality was that she was very much clued into the sexual mores of the day, and possessed an astonishingly high sexual libido herself, realised not only with Albert but with his good friend John Brown, whom she employed as a ‘personal assistant’ following Al’s untimely death.
As heart rending as the statue of woof woof Islay is outside the QVB, nothing matches the sheer emotional drama of the statues of Victoria and Albert, that sit on opposite sides of Macquarie Street near the Hyde Park Barracks. Divided by a never ending snake of city traffic, they are as separated today as they were when typhoid fever stole the good Prince away, aged only forty-two. Sydney needs to act and finally acknowledge that whilst in life they were virtually inseparable (apart from Albert’s occasional philandering), in death they should remain at least symbolically united.
If the statues can’t be relocated to sit immediately alongside each other, then we humbly suggest a linkage be strung across Macquarie Street to marry their hearts and souls. It could be as simple as a string of coloured LED lights or as daring as a chain of giant Prince Albert rings. These days you’re more likely to find a statue of Bart Cummings or Wally Lewis gracing the landscape than a member of the British Royal Family. We may never see a life-sized bronze of Elizabeth II in Sydney, so let’s make do and pay reverence to the fortune in regal scrap metal that already exists. God Save Queen Victoria!
