The night before Prince Philip’s funeral in April last year, Governor-General David Hurley sat nervously beside the phone.
The night before Prince Philip’s funeral in April last year, David Hurley – the first Australian governor-general to be born after the Queen’s 70-year reign began – sat nervously beside the phone in his office in Yarralumla.
After he’d passed on his condolences, the first question the Queen had for her official representative in Australia was for the welfare of the people in the West Australian town of Kalbarri, where hundreds of homes had been destroyed by cyclone Seroja. “You, of course, go through the whole experience of who hangs up first — you or the Queen,” he laughed. “It is always a nervous moment.”
“I think at the moment people centre on the Queen, and then when she goes, when she passes, then the succession comes in, there’s a new discussion in Australia,” he told reporters.