Steve Price: What really happened on Charles and Diana’s royal tour of Australia
Netflix’s new season of The Crown leaves viewers divided over fiction and fact. Steve Price travelled around Australia with Prince Charles and Princess Diana on their royal tour and he reveals what the series missed.
Opinion
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Netflix this week released season 4 of its Crown series — a 10-episode run that introduces Diana Spencer, the soon-to-be wife of Charles, the Prince of Wales.
We all know how that ended in tragedy with Diana’s death in Paris, but here in series four, episode six, Australia features prominently.
It tracks the 1983 six-week royal tour of Australia and New Zealand that started in, of all places, Alice Springs — but how accurate is the retelling of this visit.
What is Netflix fiction and what is Australian historical fact?
Well hang on, I’m about to tell you what really happened because I was an eyewitness, for four of those six weeks, covering their visit for the Melbourne Herald.
I travelled with Charles and Diana around Australia in what the series portrays as the global coming out of the shy Di.
Before we get to Alice Springs and my face-to-face meeting with the most famous woman on earth back then, let’s remember what an astonishing first three months that year delivered.
Six weeks before the royals arrived — on February 3 — Australia had an unprecedented day in federal politics.
Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser went and saw Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen and was granted a double dissolution election for March 5 — on the same day at the same time, as federal Labor leader Bill Hayden was knifed by the charismatic Bob Hawke to set up the famous drovers’ dog election.
Just a few days after Fraser got his election, on February 8 Melbourne was buried in a massive dust storm that dumped 1000 tonnes of Mallee topsoil on the city. Australia was also in the grip of a crippling drought.
It was like the end of the world, but worse was to come.
Ash Wednesday on February 16 saw a series of deadly bushfires sweep across South Australia and Victoria, killing 72 people and destroying 2000 homes.
Bob Hawke went on to win on March 5 and Malcolm Fraser conceded, famously crying as he departed.
Just 15 days later, new parents Prince Charles and Princess Diana along with baby Prince William fly into Alice Springs for the start of their Australian tour.
Australian and British media descended on the Red Centre to cover what was to be the coming out of Diana as a global superstar.
Things started to go wrong from the start, although Netflix seems to concentrate on this notion that the trip was more about the deteriorating relationship between the royal couple.
Believe me, watching this up close it was much more than that.
I went to Alice Springs three days earlier than planned with legendary Melbourne Herald photographer Bruce Howard to cover a flood.
Throwing the meticulously planned royal tour into chaos, Alice Springs was hit by a massive rainstorm that created a raging flood, turning the town’s normally dry Todd River into a deadly torrent.
The rain event cut the town in half, cut power and awkwardly meant Charles and Diana’s luxury suite at the Lasseters Hotel Casino couldn’t be reached.
Alternative accommodation needed to be found, frustrating the bravely mad Fleet Street photographer who had spent several days hiding in the casino’s pool house ceiling hoping for a poolside bikini shot of Diana.
Remember this was 1983 and pics of Di in a bathing suit were worth a fortune to the British tabloids. Just ask another photographer on that tour, the London Sun’s Arthur Edwards, who had crawled through a West Indies jungle for just that picture.
Royal organisers and the Australian government quickly needed to find alternative accommodation because of the floods — not an easy task in Alice Springs.
They chose — can you believe it — The Gap Motel halfway between the airport and downtown Alice.
Now The Gap Motel — known these days as The Gap View Hotel with a Priscilla Queen of the Desert theme — was not what you would imagine a royal destination to look like.
Bruce Howard and I decided to check it out before the royals arrived, take a few pictures and describe it for our readers. We asked if we could inspect the newly-booked royal suite and were told it was occupied by then Northern Territory Chief Minister Paul Everingham.
Paul was in town for the royal visit and about to be evicted from his accommodation. These were the days before mobile phones, so we used the house phone to call the NT Chief Minister and ask for an interview in his room.
He agreed but quickly realised when we knocked on the door that we were more interested in the room that him, so he left and said “Lock up after you leave”.
The Royal suite was actually The Gap Motel’s presidential suite and to our surprise the bathroom featured a wooden hot tub. With some careful framing Bruce managed to capture an image of the tub and the room’s kingsize bed.
Job done we filed our story, with the royals arrival just hours away and on-sold the image to our sister publication in the UK, the London Sun.
Bingo! Page 1 of the London Sun the next day the headline was “RUB A DUB-DUB TWO IN A TUB” and so the tour began.
Netflix, for some inexplicable reason, didn’t pick up our hot tub exclusive and concentrated instead on the tensions between Diana and the royal tour organisers surrounding the young Prince William. As a young mum she wanted the prince to tour with her, instead he was taken by a nanny to a NSW sheep station to be minded — with the occasional visit by his parents.
On night one of this month-long inspection of hospitals, school yards, farms and small businesses, the travelling media pack was invited to a cocktail party to meet Charles and Diana.
I’m not sure that would happen today, and if Diana had any inkling of how the British tabloid media pack was going to make her life a misery in the future it probably wouldn’t have happened that night either.
In the room was Arthur Edwards, the London Sun photographer who probably did more to make her a global media star than anyone else, and his legendary reporter sidekick Harry Arnold.
Harry famously broke the first story of the romance between Charles and Diana, although another reporter in that room in Alice Springs that night, the dapper James Whittaker, claimed it was him.
Also present was the journalist who went on to write Diana’s biography, Andrew Morton. He made a career and a fortune from writing about Diana.
Morton must have been impressed by my hot tub story when later on that tour he offered me a modest retainer to tip him off to anything I came across as he left Australia early.
For me, the lingering memory of actually meeting her Royal Highness in person was how perfect her skin was. She didn’t say much and because of royal protocol we were banned from revealing details of the conversation anyway.
Early in the Netflix tour episode, they feature what was portrayed as Charles and Di giving a radio interview to an Alice Springs talkback presenter.
If my memory is right this never happened; the royals actually spent about half an hour talking to children on remote cattle stations via School of the Air.
One scene the streaming giant did get correct had Diana dressed in a bright yellow dress walking through Alice Springs waving to the crowds.
Bizarrely I remember clearly that outfit because I had promised myself I wouldn’t start writing about what Diana was wearing until at least two weeks into the trip.
This was day three and I led the afternoon edition of the then Melbourne Herald with a story about a young princess stunning Alice Springs in a canary yellow dress.
On the Netflix version of events our visit to Uluru — it was still called Ayers Rock back then — was full of tension as Prince Charles bounded up the rock with Diana struggling to keep up wearing inappropriate shoes.
Real story is we flew out there from the Alice — me in a hired light plane — for a staged shot of the couple as the sun set. Di would have been streets ahead of Charles if the climb had actually happened, but it was a small platform constructed for the photo opportunity.
Imagine the outcry today if a member of the royal family dared set foot on Uluru — forget shoes, it would be an international incident.
From Alice Springs and Uluru, we also made a day trip to Tennant Creek and the story we could never quite pin down. Netflix ignored this day on the tour but the royals visited a local school.
Mysteriously in downtown Tennant Creek that day — a remote community with a large Indigenous population — there was very few Aboriginal people.
Locals hinted that tour organisers had put on a barbecue on the outskirts of town to prevent royal eyes from locking onto Indigenous poverty that was as evident back then as it still is today in the Northern Territory.
Netflix rightly focused on the massive crowds that this tour attracted and a cute trick I was taught by the experienced hands from Fleet Street’s royal reporters.
Find a person in the crowd at the front of the queue and get them to ask Charles or Diana a question — then keep your fingers crossed they get that opportunity and get an answer.
One young mum I primed asked Diana if she was missing her young baby William. The answer she got was gold — Diana told our plant that it was like torture not seeing him.
Another front page detailing Princess Diana’s emotional separation from her young Prince and the torture of the trip without him.
As the four-week grind continued through a blur of places like the Yandina ginger factory on the Sunshine Coast, where the royals rode a mini train, there were some emotional moments.
None more so than Diana’s emotional support for CFA volunteers who had fought Ash Wednesday fires at times without regard for personal risk.
Netflix has twisted the story but is spot on about that tour turning Diana into a global superstar, upsetting her more experienced husband Charles along the way.
He became jealous and she shone, even charming the new PM Bob Hawke with her easy laugh and charm.
Steve Price has joined the Saturday Herald Sun as a weekly columnist
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