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This chapter charts how changing geo-political relations during late colonialism influenced conventional imperial ideologies of race, gender and identity and brought about a fundamental shift in women’s visual literacy. Through their unofficial, un-commissioned and private visual records of early post-colonial history, women were often able to promote new understandings of political, racial and gender transformations specific to crucial times for the British Empire and the Commonwealth. It argues that British women amateur filmmakers transcended traditional historical discourses in recording their own first-person narratives. The chapter centres on the analysis of particular sequences filmed in markedly different geo-political contexts by Queen Elizabeth II, Audrey Lewis, and two of Maharaja Vijaysinhji of Rajpipla’s British female friends. Their films prompt new perspective on how and why British women amateur filmmakers chose to record men as possible agents of national and imperial post-colonial identity. The cine-women discussed in this chapter witnessed and filmed radical shifts in representations of gender-driven, post-imperial roles within specific cultural norms and opportunities. As a result, questions of gendered and visual appropriation are considered in relation to feminist and postcolonial theories while acknowledging that the interpretation of British women's amateur visual practice often requires new methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches.

Since the mid nineteenth century, prophecies of constitutional monarchy’s impending demise have far outnumbered the political initiatives taken to remove it. In the sixteen Commonwealth countries that currently retain the Queen as their Head of State, the end of the monarchical connection has repeatedly been pronounced as inevitable, yet the institution’s long-demonstrated capacity for adaptability and re-invention have continually defied predictions of its imminent death. Nonetheless, images of death prevail. The prospect of the death of Queen Elizabeth II has framed much of the public discussion regarding the future of constitutional monarchy, especially in Australia, where many republicans who led the ‘yes’ campaign in Australia’s 1999 referendum seem to have fallen in line with conventional wisdom: the Australian republic must wait for royal rigor mortis to occur. To date, however, there has been no systematic attempt to identify the reasons behind the survival of constitutional monarchy in the former dominions. Comparing the recent experience of New Zealand, Canada and Australia (1990–2014) this chapter explains the reasons behind constitutional monarchy’s extraordinary longevity in all three countries. While the chapter focuses predominantly on Australia, the only country to have held a referendum on the question of a republic, it also points to the increasing convergence of arguments in all three countries for the removal of constitutional monarchy. The chapter argues that the traditional arguments that once sustained constitutional monarchy no longer hold sway. The most powerful argument for its retention is its irrelevance.

In the years after the war, radio faced a new threat from within Britain, as television rose to become the new dominant channel for the mediation of national culture. This transition is best represented by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the first national event to draw more television viewers than radio listeners across the country. This double coronation—of monarch and medium—represents not so much the total eclipse of radio as the recalibration of the media ecology, as technologies continued to jostle for primacy in a crowded sensory landscape. For the writers who helped to write the radio war, however, it nonetheless signalled the passing of a moment of cultural primacy for those whose work encompassed the written and the spoken word.

At the end of the twentieth century there were major reforms to the honours system. These were connected to larger processes of social change following the political and social shifts of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993 the honours system was revised by John Major and civil servants concerned about its reputation as class-based and automatic for civil servants. The lower ranks of the Order of the British Empire (which make up a majority of total honours given out) were reoriented towards voluntary service and away from professional state service. Honours became a way of paying volunteers to do work once done by the state using social capital rather than money. This chapter also details the relationship between these changes and the role of the monarchy in British society. After 1948, all British recipients of honours at the level of MBE and above were entitled to visit Buckingham Palace and receive their award from a royal personage. Autobiographical writing suggests a set of characteristic experiences and feelings. Many who recorded their experiences not only celebrated their encounter, but also expressed empathy with the monarch, affirming both the normalcy of the royal family and also their special status. John Major’s reforms (and similar ones that followed them in the early 2000s) thus reintegrated two functions of the monarchy—its role as the affirmer of national merit through the honours system and its status as the leader of the voluntary sector in Britain.

In December 2018, Queen Elizabeth II recorded her annual televised Christmas broadcast while seated in front of an astonishingly ornate Erard piano purchased by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert from the London branch of the firm in 1856. The piano immediately became a symbol of excess and luxury in a time of social turmoil. The ‘gold piano affair’ reminds us that Erard pianos are more than just beautiful objects. They are musical instruments that can evoke a lost sound world. They are artefacts that carry traces of a rich history of creativity and inventiveness and the patronage that made such innovation possible. They are relics that remind us of the musicians who played them and who composed for them. And they are also precious reminders of one exceptional family and their passion for the piano.