Over the years, I’ve been startled when the mainstream media dips into royal gossip. I remember when it happened throughout 2022. Prince William and Kate’s Caribbean Flop tour became headline news internationally, all because of Will and Kate’s colonialist behavior and catastrophic photo-ops. Then the Jubbly became major news because of the Sussexes’ presence. Then QEII died and the international, mainstream media covered everything through the prism of how the family treated the Sussexes (like sh-t). Well, I think it’s going to happen again with King Charles and Queen Camilla’s Australian tour. I think the mainstream press is going to dip in and cover whatever goes down, perhaps because they’re expecting the tour to be a massive disaster for Charles’s reign. From Reuters’ new piece, “Ambivalent Australia awaits King Charles on first big overseas tour since cancer diagnosis.”
King Charles, the only British monarch who has spent time living in Australia, arrives on Friday for his inaugural visit to an overseas realm as sovereign, his first major foreign trip since being diagnosed with cancer. The first visit by a reigning monarch in 13 years has revived debate in Australia over whether a British royal should be head of state, although polling shows Australians remain ambivalent about becoming a republic.
Concern for King Charles’s health has seen the republican movement’s founder, “Schindler’s List” author Thomas Keneally, accept an invitation to meet a royal couple he says are amiable and relatable. It is embarrassing that Australians are subjects of the king, Keneally said in an interview, adding this was no fault of King Charles, who has said a republic is a matter for Australians to decide. “I hope he is OK on this tour because he has that cancer,” Keneally said. “He is not the problem in all this, because he said over and over it’s up to us.”
A poll published in News Corp newspapers this week showed support for Australia remaining a constitutional monarchy at 45%, compared to 33% support for becoming a republic and the rest undecided. A national referendum on becoming a republic was defeated in 1999 and dropped off the political agenda of the ruling centre-left Labor Party after Queen Elizabeth died in 2022.
As Australia prepares for the king’s visit, pro-republic campaigners are distributing posters promoting the “farewell to monarchy tour”.
“We’d love to wave goodbye to royal reign,” said Nathan Hansford, co-chair of the Australian Republic Movement. Keneally, 89, said when he founded the Australian Republic Movement in 1991, formal meetings in Australia required a toast to the monarch and the royal portrait was hung in every public building.
“When we drank to Australia, we drank to the Queen of Australia, and I felt that didn’t represent who we were,” he said. Australia has changed from a largely Anglo-Celtic society to an immigrant nation welcoming new citizens who no longer must swear allegiance to the king, yet it still has “a very strange addiction to the monarchy,” Keneally said.
“The gravity is pulling our way, but it is pulling very slow in the republican direction. The disappearance of the monarch from public life is a sign of all that,” he said.
Several things are clear to me at this point: Buckingham Palace does not trust William and Kate to make these kinds of trips on behalf of the king, because any and all backlash would be a thousand times worse and more high-profile, and William wouldn’t be able to manage his way out of the crisis. It’s also clear that the palace is actually fine with these kinds of stories coming out before Charles’s trip because they really are lowering expectations. Australians ignoring Charles is preferable to being passionately protested. The palace will declare victory if Charles and Camilla manage to get through the tour without any public catastrophes. The open questions are: the size of the republican protests and whether the mainstream, international media will cover everything, even if there are no major f–kups.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.