"Compromise Tour Qualified Success’

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30093, 29 March 1963, Page 11

"Compromise Tour Qualified Success’

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, March 28. The Royal tour of Australia was at best “a qualified success” and often “painfully formal,” the “Guardian” reported today.

The newspaper's correspondent in Melbourne said it was “on the whole a disappointing visit." There was the absence of “a wholeheartedly Uuitional interest and enthusiasm,” he said. The correspondent said the fact that this was not the Queen’s first visit counted for something. “So also did the fact that certain strains have been heavily placed on the bonds linking Australia and Britain. . . .

“Britain’s proposed entry into the Common Market gave this country a jolt comparable, say, with the loss of Singapore during the war—and one just as meaningful” he Mid.

The correspondent asked: “Are the Queen and her family over-publicised in the popular press and all other media of information and entertainment? “It is an incredibly mammoth coverage and surely almost impossible for any one human being to live up to adequately in public eyes," be said

He said the Queen “is not an extrovert and publicity has just about taken aiway any vestige of mystery ” The correspondent said the Queen's own “lack of response’ to big ‘ cheering

crowds when they were near was part of the reason for a dying off of enthusiasm on some occasions. “So often it was left to the ‘hard core’ knots of fervid Royalists, the regular public function stickbeaks and the mothers with children to bolster the flagging cheers,” he said.

Formality remained in spite of all palace and Canberra promises that it would be curtailed, he Mid. “It was still often a painfully formal visit, with its regular appearances of top political reformers, handshaking on rostrums, loyal addresses, etc.

"As a compromise between a full-scale formal tour and the brief informal visit it failed to muster either popular approval or imagination,” he said.