Royal visits to Australia have not been without their dramas. Queen Victoria‘s son, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh was the target of the country’s first assassination attempt in 1868 when he was shot and seriously wounded by an Irish lunatic.
In 1994, King Charles III, as Prince of Wales, was attacked by a gunman charging at him through a Sydney park, firing blanks, as it later transpired.
During the Queen’s 1954 tour, the first by a reigning monarch, thousands of people required first aid after crowd surges in Sydney while hundreds were injured when a grandstand collapsed in Cairns.
Many years later, there was a frightful hoo-ha when the then-Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, was seen to put an arm around her (she was not remotely bothered since he was steering her through a crowded reception at the time).
In the scheme of things, yesterday’s foul-mouthed tirade from an independent senator in Canberra’s Parliament House, was more eye-popping than a cause for concern. ‘You are not my King,’ shouted Lidia Thorpe, a well-known campaigner on indigenous rights, before being escorted off the premises. ‘You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people.’
King Charles III and Queen Camilla during a tour of the Australian National Botanic Gardens, in Canberra, on day two of the royal visit to Australia and Samoa
Queen Camilla meets members of the public during a visit tothe For our Country – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander memorial
Crowds gather to welcome King Charles III and Queen Camilla. But the visit also attracted anti-monarchy protests
Senator Lidia Thorpe, 51, launched a foul-mouthed tirade at the King during his visit to Parliament House
In the scheme of things, yesterday’s foul-mouthed tirade from an independent senator in Canberra’s Parliament House, was more eye-popping than a cause for concern. (Senator Lidia Thorpe disrupts proceedings as Britain’s King Charles III and Queen Camilla attend a reception at Parliament House)
The Royal Family have been accused of many things over the years but genocidal grave-robbing and infant kidnap may be a first.
However, when you are the living symbol of a nation’s complex history, you can expect to become the focal point for historic grievances, particularly now that campaigns for ‘reparatory justice’ are all the rage on the Left of Western politics.
So, will yesterday’s outburst sour the King’s first visit to Australia as monarch? On the contrary. A tour prefaced by the usual debate about the merits of an Australian republic has already proved that there remains a deep-rooted mutual affection.
Yes, grandstanding regional politicians have pointedly turned down invitations to royal events. But the crowds have been much larger and livelier than expected and the King has been keen to show his appreciation of the gradual shifts in Australia’s sense of nationhood.
Most republicans – the current PM included – will have been appalled by yesterday’s foul-mouthed outburst as it demeans a perfectly respectable intellectual cause. It also misinterpreted the historic role of the monarchy in Australia.
Before the Endeavour landed there in 1770, King George III had asked Captain Cook ‘to observe the genius, temper, disposition and number of the natives… and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance’.
Subsequent British and Australian governments may have committed many wrongs but not at the behest of the monarch.
Long before the King’s departure last week, he had a cordial exchange of correspondence with the Australian Republican Movement. This week he has been the first reigning monarch to attend a ‘smoking ceremony’, an Aboriginal ritual of burning local medicinal plants as a form of both welcome and protection.
Senator Lidia Thorpe reposted a cartoon of the King’s head lying next to a crown, after it was created by Matt Chun, co-editor of anti-imperialist publication The Sunday Paper
The Royal Family have been accused of many things over the years but genocidal grave-robbing and infant kidnap may be a first. (King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrive for a visit at Canberra Airport)
In 1994, King Charles III, as Prince of Wales, was attacked by a gunman charging at him through a Sydney park, firing blanks, as it later transpired. (King Charles III views The Royal Guard of Honour during the Ceremonial Welcome to Australia)
Yesterday, he went further than any previous monarch acknowledging that the Aboriginal community were the ‘traditional owners’ of the land. Though there will be many walkabouts this week, no one is calling them that.
The Australian government and the Palace prefer not to use the word since a ‘walkabout’ is an Aboriginal term, which means something very different. It was actually coined by Daily Mail journalist Vincent Mulchrone on the Queen’s tour of New Zealand in 1970. In Australia, to ‘go walkabout’ is to take oneself off into the bush alone, not to wade into a crowd shaking hands.
And there have been plenty of those crowds, not least because Australians – both royalists and republicans – appreciate that Charles III is no stranger.
As a teenage Prince, he spent two terms at an Australian school, Geelong, and has been coming back regularly ever since. In 1970, he and Princess Anne accompanied their parents to the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s landing, their first conventional tour as ‘working royals’.
The following decade, after his marriage to Diana, it was even mooted that Prince Charles might be appointed Governor-General of Australia (though the prospect of being drawn into national politics eventually ruled it out).
All the while, republican sentiment gathered momentum, not through animosity towards the Windsors so much as a growing sense that a proudly independent nation should cut the filial ties to a former colonial motherland now wedded to Europe. Yet time and again, those bonds have proved surprisingly robust, as this tour has shown.
Much as republicans like Lidia Thorpe may try to portray the monarchy as an outdated relic still ‘clinging on’, they are missing the point.
The King’s view has not changed one bit from the sentiment that he expressed on the subject in 1994 as Prince of Wales: ‘Personally, I happen to think that it is a sign of a mature and self-confident nation to debate those issues and to use the democratic process.’ In other words: it’s your call.
King Charles and Queen Camilla are pictured reacting to Senator Thorpe’s outburst in Parliament House
Firebrand Indigenous politician Lidia Thorpe has interrupted King Charles’ address at Parliament House with a foul-mouthed rant, after he finished his speech praising AustraliaÂ
It was a message that was entirely upstaged by that shooting incident in a Sydney park hours earlier. The headlines were all about the Prince’s coolness under fire, not the speech. That was 30 years ago. Next month sees a more significant royal anniversary. It will be 25 years to the day when Australia went to the polls to vote in a referendum on whether to eject the late Queen in favour of a president.
The political and media classes all expected the result to go against the Crown. I have interviewed the country’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, who was in the thick of the campaign for the republican cause, and another former prime minister, Tony Abbott, who was in the vanguard of the royalist cause. As the polls closed, both assumed that the Crown was over.
Hence the shock at the result. The Australian public had decided by a margin of 55:45 that, faced with a choice between a president chosen by politicians, or an hereditary monarch, they’d rather have the status quo.
The astonishment was not dissimilar to that across Britain on the morning after the Brexit vote. Four months later, however, the Queen went back Down Under to show there were no hard feelings. That visit had been agreed before the vote so that there would be no hard feelings, regardless of the result.
Interestingly, Julia Gillard told me that one major miscalculation among the republicans was the appetite for change among multi-cultural, migrant communities. The assumption had been that they would favour a ‘new’ Australia. In fact, they were among those keenest on keeping the Queen.
‘If you come from a nation of coups and civil war, you see change through a different prism. It is scary,’ Ms Gillard told me. ‘For many of them, the word ‘republic’ is not a good word. Bad things happened.’
It was also a reminder of a very significant obstacle to creating an Australian presidency: any constitutional reform requires not just a majority of voters but a majority vote in a majority of the six states. In 1999, it failed in every one.
As a constitutional monarch, the King cannot have a view, beyond demanding fair play.
So, he and Queen Camilla will be just as happy gladhanding royalists or republicans this week. As far as they are concerned, there will be nothing personal about it, whatever Senator Thorpe might say.
However, those activists currently selling T-shirts proclaiming this as the monarchy’s ‘farewell tour’ may yet find that the last laugh is on them.
