‘Only a shadow’: Grim sign in King Charles and Queen Camilla’s tour
The King and Queen Camilla are finally in Australia – but their big smiles and hearty waves to the crown hide a very stark reality.
Thursday, February 11, 1954: A tree planting beside a bridge in Wollongong.
Tuesday, February 23, 1954: An informal lunch at the Burnie Chamber of Commerce. Wednesday, March 3, 1954: An inspection of whatever the hell an “open cut brown coal field” is. (Look away Greta, look away).
When the young, freshly crowned Queen turned up in Australia in 1954, it was for the unholy length of 58 days. She visited 57 towns and cities in just under two months, from Cairns to Broken Hill to Hobart. She addressed 107,000 schoolchildren and kept going through a polio outbreak such that she could only eat on board a naval vessel moored off the West Australian coast.
The stamina, the dedication, the ladylike shoe leather.
On Friday night, her son and heir King Charles landed in the country, and his numbers, his statistics, his runs on the board? They are not good.
Oh yes, the King has and will laugh and smile and give us all the bonhomie, all the modern-day merry monarch imagery retirees the length and breadth of the nation might be hankering after (phwoar, did you see his lack of bunions?)
But the figures? The data? They tell a much starker story.
True: Charles is nearly 76 and is obviously battling cancer. However, with he and wife Queen Camilla and their travelling blood supplies “in country”, there is no avoiding the cold, hard truth of his program.
Their Majesties are on Aussie soil for just four full days, with one whole day set aside purely for rest, and the King undertaking events in only two cities.
On Sunday, the King was only scheduled to be “on” for 130 minutes. There are no events planned after 5pm on any day. No night-time receptions, and no events outside New South Wales, aside from a quick daytime dash to Canberra.
This is not a criticism, merely an observation that this trip looks and feels distinctly different to previous ones.
Perhaps the most telling detail from the King’s program is the timing.
On Sunday, his working day started at 10.30am at a Sydney church service before a 12.40pm meeting with a couple of stiff dignitaries.
His longest day, Monday, will see Their Majesties descend on the capital for a fast and furious dash from the War Memorial to Parliament House to Yarralumla to the Botanic Gardens. Whiplash, anyone?
Tuesday’s schedule will start very late in the morning and will conclude with a final naval thingamy, no seamen jokes anyone, around afternoon tea time.
The whole thing is compressed, abbreviated and trimmed.
The mood music out of London ahead of this southerly excursion has been clear – this is a “limited” tour given the King’s continued treatment for cancer. But no amount of big regal smiles and affable waving at the crowds of Rotary members lined up near the Opera House can change the underlying fact that this tour is only a shadow of what a royal overseas jaunt usually looks like.
The last time that Charles and Camilla, the First Couple of dog-hair strewn furniture, were in our part of the world was in 2018 for the Commonwealth Games, during which they clocked up 19 engagements in three days.
The trip before that, in 2015, they managed to do 31 events across Adelaide, Canberra, Sydney, Albany and Perth in under five days.
Or take Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who were in Australia, coincidentally, at exactly this time in 2018. They notched up 76 official outings over 14 days – and while the duchess was pregnant with their son Prince Archie.
In 2014, it was Prince William and Kate, now the Prince and Princess of Wales’ turn to find out if the toilets really do flush in reverse here.
They totted up 23 engagements over nine days in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Uluru, and all with a baby Prince George in tow.
You see my point here.
Ever since February 5, when Buckingham Palace shocked the sensible pants off the world with the news that the King had cancer, there has been a peculiar sort of multiple personality disorder going on in London.
On one hand, the King has been remarkably, and some might say, naively open about owning his diagnosis, sharing regular updates (well, of a certain opaque variety), showing his support for fellow sufferers by visiting a cancer treatment centre and revealing that messages of goodwill and support had “reduced me to tears”.
And yet on the other, there has been a certain amount of acting as if. Acting as if Charles is just a regular, garden-variety 75-year-old King with receptions to host and medium-sized industrial cities to visit. He has plugged on with the business of sitting on the throne, including presiding over the State opening of parliament, as if he is fighting, fiddly-dee fit and isn’t on first name terms, I’m guessing, with his oncology nurses.
This dissociative dualism, if you will, has by and large worked – until now. But what these tour numbers throw up is the undeniable truth – that this horrible cancer of his has and will continue to slow him down and rudely curtail his ability to be the go get ‘em sort of King he clearly wants to be.
When this trip to the Pacific was first mooted PC (pre-cancer), it was meant to be a much more meaningful one, including not only Australia and Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, where he will head next, but also Fiji and New Zealand.
Those latter legs have long been axed and you would have to think, having flown 44 hours there and back, that the King would have ideally liked to spend more time on Australian soil than 111 hours – and then only venturing out to meet actual Australians during very civilised, if not constrained, daylight hours.
More of this lies ahead.
November will see the annual COP climate conference take place in Baku, Azerbaijan and Charles is obviously a longtime passionate environmentalist, having been flying the climate flag since the days when it was just the province of the nut loaf-eating, sandal-wearing crowd. Last year, the King gave the opening COP address in Kuwait. This COP, Charles won’t be there. The reason given by the Palace for him staying home is, according to the Daily Beast, that His Majesty will only have “recently” returned to the UK from Australia and Samoa – yet there will be a full two weeks between his arrival back in Britain and the start of COP.
The Beast’s Tom Sykes says that this rationale “suggests that the King’s family and aides will be encouraging the King … to take plenty of time to recuperate” and “will also stoke fears that the King is more seriously ill than his office are saying”.
At least his wife is happy with this outcome, with a friend of the couple having told Sykes: “Camilla will be pleased he is not going straight off to Azerbaijan. She didn’t particularly want him to go to Australia, and she will be encouraging him to take it easy once he gets back – never an easy task.”
And at least no one made her, as they did with her late mother-in-law, spend an afternoon viewing brown coal. Monarchy is really not a pretty business.
Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles
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