Here are more photos of King Charles and Queen Camilla in Australia, during the first day in Canberra, the nation’s capital. Charles looked worse for wear after such a long-haul flight to Oz and an especially stage-managed visit to Sydney. Speaking of Charles’s health, the Daily Mail’s A.N. Wilson – regarded as one of the more old-guard monarchist commentators – wrote an interesting and offensive piece in the Mail over the weekend. The Daily Beast’s team suggested that Wilson’s true purpose in writing the column was “the subtextual ways of the British media—who are heavily restricted in what they can say about Charles’ health by privacy legislation and rules—is [his] heavy handed emphasis of just how ill the king is.” I would also suggest that Wilson’s purpose was to insult Australians and challenge them to walk away from the crown. Some highlights from: “Why Charles should call the bluff of these drongo and ungracious Aussies and announce he’ll quit as their head of state.”
Charles’s health: “Not only is this Charles’s first visit to Australia since taking the throne, and the first by a British monarch since 2011, but one that he has made at considerable risk to his health. We do not know the advice of his physician but one cannot imagine he or she is best pleased their patient has paused his cancer treatment to fly almost 24 hours around the globe – albeit with not one but two doctors in tow and armed with a supply of the monarch’s blood were a transfusion needed. I don’t envy Charles.”
Wall-to-wall republican protests: “From the first engagement to the last, he and Camilla will be met with demands for the country to become a republic. Given that Britain’s very own anti-monarchist Graham Smith – head of the campaign group Republic and he of the ‘Not My King’ fame who staged a miserable demonstration of yellow placards on the procession route at Charles’s Coronation – has flown to Australia, too, it’s feared that six governors bunking a state reception will be the least of the King’s worries. Charles, ultimately, will never reach the same heights of popularity as his mother.”
Australia is both a woke utopia & a cultural desert: But Oz has now become a cultural desert – witness the years in which the Sydney Opera House remained empty and closed because no one thought it worth restoring. Instead, Australia has become a woke utopia (if that’s your idea of utopia), ashamed of its caricature as the land of beer-swilling men and brassy, suburban Sheilas of the small-c conservative kind, and bending over backwards to right past wrongs. The Aussies have plenty to be penitent about, given the ghastly way they treated the indigenous Aboriginal population.
PM Albanese probably won’t force the issue of an Australian republic: So Charles should, I believe, force the issue. To spike the republicans’ guns, should he not offer to step down as the head of state in Australia? To put it to that continent-sized country: back me or sack me. Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy would be hardly likely to stop him. They could not get rid of the Chagos Islands fast enough, and it is obvious neither of them sees the point of the Commonwealth, which meant so much to the late Queen, as it does to King Charles. If Charles seizes the initiative, he will have left the dignity of the monarchy intact, and the idea of the Commonwealth strong.
Rootless Aussies: Of course, this new, rootless Oz generation, who have no idea who they are or where they come from, won’t look a royal gift horse in the mouth and will eagerly turn the country into a republic. When they come to elect a new head of state, the Aussies will almost indubitably elect a person of Aboriginal descent – something that the King, with his long history of reconciling the different cultures and ethnicity of his British subjects, would welcome. Good luck to them.
Charles’s health again: The behaviour of their governors and politicians already looks like ingratitude and bad manners. The behaviour of the crowds looks in danger of being worse than ill-mannered, and we can only feel anxious on the royal couple’s behalf. With a typical sense of duty and loyalty to the Australia he knew in his youth, Charles is undertaking a gruelling round of engagements which is surely unwise, given his health problems. If, during the course of this week, he announces that he no longer wishes to be their King, Charles will have said something valuable and meaningful. He would no longer have to go through the humiliation of ruling Oz on sufferance. And he could return to the home country, which loves and cherishes the monarchy – and sees the point of it, which the Aussies no longer do.
This reads as a British temper tantrum that Australians don’t feel connected to “the crown” and have no love for any of the left-behind royals. “You want to leave us, too bad, WE’RE LEAVING YOU, how do you like that??” Which the Australians would probably welcome? I remember hearing, not long ago, that most Australians feel a deeper cultural kinship with America rather than Britain, and they want closer ties with Asian and North American allies rather than an attachment to the crown. It’s sort of ridiculous that Wilson is making a totally reasonable suggestion, and he’s wrapped up that suggestion in layers of racism, colonialism and monarchist boot-licking.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.