King Charles and Queen Camilla have left Australia after more than 30 official engagements – and a fair share of controversy – packed into just four full days on the ground.
In the stage-managed whirlwind were churchgoers, bushfire scientists, a violinist, authors, dancers, architects, chefs, surf life savers, schoolchildren, republicans and monarchists – and unscripted discordance as activists took up Aboriginal sovereignty directly with the crown.
Senator Lidia Thorpe’s shouts of “this is not your country” to the king in Parliament House on Monday were accompanied by small protests in Sydney and Canberra, including by the Kooma Murri activist Wayne “Coco” Wharton, who attempted on both Monday and Tuesday to deliver a “notice of complicity in Aboriginal Genocide” to the king. He was arrested near the Sydney Opera House on Tuesday afternoon after shouting to people queueing to see the royals that Australia was “a nation of thieves”.
The message was delivered less bluntly by Uncle Allan Murray of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council, who told the king when he visited the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence in Redfern on Tuesday: “Welcome to country. We’ve got stories to tell and I think you witnessed that story yesterday in Canberra, but the story is unwavering and we’ve got a long way to achieve what we want to achieve and that’s our own sovereignty.”
It wasn’t only Charles III’s first visit to Australia as king, but his first tour as king. It was unique in another way too, with Charles’s ongoing cancer treatment resulting in a pared-down schedule, taking in just Canberra and Sydney before Samoa.
On Wednesday morning, when the royal visitors lifted off in Sydney, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, said in a statement that their visit had been “historic”.
“Their majesties met a range of extraordinary Australians who demonstrated the best of our great country,” he said.
Juliet Rieden, a royal commentator and author of The Royals in Australia, said the tour, though “fast and furious”, was long enough to offer a sense of Charles’s stamp on the monarchy.
“Everyone wondered how his reign would be different from the Queen’s. And I think we saw here that the way it’s going to be different is in his relationship with the public,” she said.
That relationship, Rieden said, was “becoming meaningful”.
There was no better moment to illustrate that than when the 71-year-old member of the stolen generations, Uncle James Michael “Widdy” Welsh, told the king he was more of a hugger than a hand-shaker. The king responded: “Hugs are good.”
“So I went in for the hug and he gave me one back,” Welsh told reporters.
Not long ago, that hug would not have happened, Rieden said.
“There might be the odd polite handshake as [the Queen] walked down the line, but none of this deep interaction, listening to people’s stories, none of the touching,” she said.
New to the monarchy, too, was the approval of selfies, with the king posing for photos with groups of schoolchildren outside the opera house. In the New South Wales parliament, politicians openly filmed the king, where, Rieden said, an equerry (royal attendant) would once have asked that phones be put away.
“This was a vision of the modern monarchy, which you wouldn’t expect to see from a 75-year-old.”
The tour was never going to have the youthful glamour of some former royal tours, but, for some, the occasion was momentous.
Among the 10,000 or so people at the opera house on Tuesday were Martin Sweeney, 50, who flew from Melbourne to see the king, and Wendy Soden, 67, who made the trip from Brisbane.
“It’s the first visit to Australia by a king … even just a glimpse of the king would be enough,” Sweeney said.
But fans’ faux crowns and union jack-emblazoned jackets were ultimately upstaged by a sneezing alpaca and a crown-wearing dachshund named Captain Bigglesworth.
There were nods to the Queen’s nation-stopping 1954 tour. Queen Camilla wore her late mother-in-law’s famous wattle brooch – given by the Australian government to Elizabeth II – when she landed in Sydney in pouring rain on Friday evening. Queen Camilla will return to London with another brooch, a tiny silver spoon presented to her by the OzHarvest charity founder, Ronni Kahn.
In Samoa, a warm welcome is ready for the king and queen when they land in Apia on Wednesday evening – though there, too, conversations swirl around its colonial past, with the subject of reparations expected to come up despite the British government stating it is not “on the agenda”.
