Throughout her years wearing the crown, leading the Church of England and carrying out duties as Head of the Commonwealth, the Queen has remained a constant.
Before the late nineties, the closest spectators would ever get to members of the royal family would be from below balconies at a wedding or a glimpse through a window of a car.
"We never shook hands," she said, according to the publication. "The theory was that you couldn't shake hands with everybody, so don't start."
But that all changed during the Queen's tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970, alongside Prince Philip, when she decided to greet the crowd on foot, rather than driving to her next destination.
Carolyn Harris, a royal historian and author, told Canada's Global News that the walkabout signaled a moment of growth for the royal family. "They didn't normally come out and just talk to ordinary people," she said. "The walkabouts, that's one of the major changes, this notion of being accessible to ordinary people."
Since 1970, some royals have followed in the Queen's footsteps — namely Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge. In an interview for an ITV documentary airing for the Queen's 90th birthday in 2016, Middleton said there's a "real art" to the walkabout, according to Vanity Fair.
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"Everybody teases me in the family that I spend far too long chatting," Middleton added.
But others haven't fully embraced the practice. Princess Anne, who was 19 at the time of the first "royal walkabout," may have played a role in the Queen's decision to start them. Royal fans in Australia turned out to see the teenager "in their thousands," according to Daily Mail editor Richard Kay in the Channel 5 documentary "Anne: The Daughter Who Should Be Queen," per the Daily Express.
However, she isn't a big fan of shaking hands. "It's not for me to say that it's wrong," Princess Anne said in the HBO documentary. "But I think the initial concept was that it was patently absurd to start shaking hands."
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