The Crown is right that Bob Hawke was a republican. But aspects of his portrayal are preposterous

The most disappointing part of the Netflix soap opera The Crown is not, from an Australian point of view, its colonial caricature of Bob Hawke insulting the Queen and plotting the constitutional ejection of the Windsors.

Nor is it the use of Spanish locations and extras to depict Australian cities, landscape and people.

It is surely the misappropriation of the term ‘terra nullius’.

The producers of The Crown show how clever they are in recreating every last detail of Princess Diana’s frocks and gowns. It’s a shame they are less careful when it comes to the important nuance and detail of Australian politics.

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‘Terra nullius’ was the legal doctrine, more correctly the myth, that Australia was unsettled at the time of English occupation in 1788. It underpinned Australian settlement until finally overthrown by the High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision, which recognised native title.

The Crown episode around Prince Charles and Diana’s visit to Australia in 1983 is called Terra Nullius, and the term also forms the heart of a pivotal piece of dialogue, in which Hawke tells Charles that ‘terra nullius’ is “what your ancestor King George the Third called us when the Brits first arrived. ‘Nobody’s country.’ Well by God we were somebody’s country then, and we are our own country now.”

It’s actually a fine sentiment. But presenting ‘terra nullius’ as somehow tied up with the argument for an Australian republic is an anachronism, a historical sleight of hand. It appropriates and perhaps trivialises the fundamental concept of Indigenous sovereignty. The Mabo decision said nothing about the head of state, and the republican movement has never really addressed Indigenous sovereignty.

It is also most unlikely to have formed part of Hawke’s vision for an Australian republic. Bob Hawke was definitely a republican, inherently committed to the logic of an Australian head of state. This much, The Crown gets right.

But Hawke could not be described as a fervent republican; in fact, his commitment to the cause was heavily diluted by pragmatism and, it must be said, by a respectful and even friendly relationship with the Queen.

In the opening scene of The Crown episode, Hawke’s doppelgänger Richard Roxburgh tells a Four Corners interviewer that he didn’t regard welcoming the royals as the most important thing he would have to do in the first month of office. This too is accurate.

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But then The Crown interview spins off into fiction with Roxburgh, as Hawke, describing the Queen as a “pig … in a twinset and pearls”. This is preposterous and bizarre. If Hawke really wanted to insult someone, he could do way better than that. Just ask Bill Hayden.

The truth is, Hawke never regarded the republic as a first order issue – especially in 1983, as an incoming prime minister with a big agenda of economic recovery and reform. He was not into the politics of symbolism. He also recognised the Queen’s popularity in Australia, and saw no reason to waste time or capital trying to change that. Over time he came up with the formula response that the push for an Australian head of state should await the death of Elizabeth – a courtesy for her, and a dig at Charles, whom he dismissed as a “nice young bloke”.

In the meantime Hawke got on with the job in statesman mode, dealing with the Queen as just another influential source of authority. The high point of this was the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Vancouver in 1987, where he persuaded the Queen to agree to suspend post-coup Fiji’s membership. He also brilliantly collaborated with Nelson Mandela, Jim Wolfensohn and others, in implementing a new set of Commonwealth sanctions against the apartheid regime, targeted at the South African financial system.

Successes such as these led Hawke to designate himself in private, with characteristic bravado, as “her favourite prime minister”. This worked simultaneously as a compliment to the Queen’s good judgment and a slight to the other Commonwealth PMs, such as Thatcher (UK), Mulroney (Canada), Lange (NZ) and Mugabe (Zimbabwe); in truth, India’s Rajiv Gandhi would have run him close, and Hawke may well have conceded the title to him.

But Hawke and the Queen shared a love of horseflesh, and the enduring image of their relationship was at the Canberra race track where they sat together in a box to watch the Queen Elizabeth Stakes. Hawke had backed the Bart Cummings-trained Beau Zam, and as the thoroughbred reached for the finish line, a half length ahead of Bonecrusher, Hawke was up on his feet, cheering his favourite home. “You bloody beauty!”

Beside this exuberant display of emotion, the Queen sat primly by, a faint smile on her face.

• Dr Stephen Mills is honorary senior lecturer, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney, and worked as speechwriter to prime minister Bob Hawke from 1986 to 1991