The Prince of Wales’s popularity in Australia has, like the monarchy as a whole, waxed and waned over the decades. Now he’s returning for a five-day tour and a meeting with a new prime minister who wants his country to be a republic

In 1901, when the future King George V visited the imperial outstation of Melbourne as the Duke of Cornwall to open the new federation’s first national parliament, an official diarist recorded the anticipation in the then Australian capital.



The diary, part of the National Library of Australia’s collection, is a bureaucratically sober document, leaden with prosaic detail. But the description of Melbourne getting out of bed to – and desperate for a glimpse of – royalty in May 1901 demonstrates a rare writerly flourish from diarist JJ Keenan.



At an early hour, Keenan writes, “the capital began to fill with a hurrying multitude” and “the whistling and rattling of railway trains through the suburbs to the metropolis could be heard for miles on every side and told of the excited patriots flooding into the city”.



Never mind that a waking Melbourne, with its rattling trains, has sounded like this pretty much since the 1890s and continues to, Keenan described the “seething mass of people who had collected from all parts of the Southern Hemisphere … to get a glimpse of the son of the king who reigns over an empire upon which the sun never sets”.



Back then it was not too bold to predict that the sun would never set on the Antipodean reaches of the empire. George – as duke and, from 1910, king – was much admired in early federated Australia, not least for leading the empire to victory in the first world war.



Georges from the House of Windsor – including the future George VI who, as Albert, Duke of York, opened the new federal parliament in Canberra in 1927, and his grandson the infant Prince George, who enjoyed the goo-ing and gah-ing of the nation when he visited here with parents William and Kate in 2014 – have tended to do pretty well in Australia.



On Prince Charles, however, Australia has always seemed somewhat more ambivalent.



Charles may yet prove not to be the eternal prince. But it does seem, on the eve of his 15th visit to these shores, as if he has been coming here for an eternity – beginning in 1967 when he spent time at the Timbertop campus of Geelong Grammar, a chosen school of Australia’s rural aristocracy.



Certainly, he’s been coming here for most of his life. Indeed, he will even mark his 67th birthday in Cottesloe, the place where, in 1979, the bachelor prince found himself, while swimming in the surf, in the damp embrace of the model Jane Priest. Nubile Priest, predictably, won that day’s headlines. But not the eligible prince who, well into his 30s and still unhitched, paired with the far more retiring nursery school assistant, Lady Diana Spencer.



She came to Australia in 1983 as “Di”, Princess of Wales. With her doe-like reticence, the young mother of William won Australian hearts. She overshadowed Charles as the sentimental favourite on that long tour. Court gossip, sourced to the prince or otherwise, that has been relayed through a library of “insider accounts” of their coupling, insist that that Australian tour was the start of the tawdry, ultimately tragic, decline of their marriage.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Diana and Charles in Australia in 1983. Photograph: John Shelley/Rex

Certainly the frailties and frustrations of the royal marriage were on full awkward display in later visits, when the shyness in Di’s demeanour had transformed into royal weariness, steely defiance, obvious unhappiness.



The place of Charles in the Australian consciousness had been muddied long before. As prime minister Malcolm Fraser raised the prospect of appointing Charles governor general – a position that, thanks to the dismissal of 11 November 1975, was already redolent with the scent of royal interference. Charles had apparently liked the idea of donning training wheels for the kingdom amid the kangaroos of Yarralumla by the lake. But public reaction was tepid and Fraser, too, cooled on the idea. Then in 1983 – rekindling the anti-royal sentiment stirred by the dismissal – Bob Hawke, in his first term as prime minister, announced Australia ought become a republic by 1988. (Then again, a few years later he also said no child would live in poverty by 1990.)

And so only one royal, Duke of Gloucester Prince Henry – third son of George V – would ever get to serve (from 1945 to 1947) as Australian governor general. And it now seems most unlikely another royal will perform such a role.

It remains to be seen if Charles, as a putative Australian king, is capable of cultivating this country’s sentiment in a way resonant of his first wife, his eldest son, daughter-in-law and grandson or, indeed, his mother. Coolly “accepted” or at best “respected” perhaps describes her long relationship with the Australian people.

Poll after poll, since the marriage of William to Kate Middleton and the arrival of their photogenic progeny (a royal baby is a baby, after all – what’s not like when they visit us here?) reinforces a decades-low nadir in republican sentiment in Australia. So much so, that the Daily Mail declared Prince George to be the “republican slayer”. Red-top hyperbole aside, Australians are roughly divided on the issue and no recent Australian prime minister has indicated a genuine willingness to prosecute change for a very long time now.

Australian sentiment on the royals – and opposition to becoming a republic – has waxed (at federation; during the reign of George V; after Elizabeth II’s coronation; after Charles and Diana’s marriage and the birth of their children; with the visit of Wills, Kate and baby George). And waned (after Edward’s abdication; after the Gough Whitlam dismissal; with the House of Windsor’s frosty reaction to Diana’s death; with the marriage of Charles to Camilla) over the years.

Prince Charles knew of idea to dismiss Whitlam before 1975 crisis, book claims Read more

But the popularity of certain royal figures should not, republican proponents say, determine the Australian policy on attachment to the monarchy or the timing of any break.



Certainly no Liberal prime minister has ever agitated, from office, for a move to a republic. Which brings us, of course, to one Malcolm Bligh Turnbull. He is a former chairman of the Australian Republican Movement who led the bid to cut ties with the monarchy ahead of the 1999 referendum. The same Turnbull who declared that the monarchist PM of the time, John Howard, “broke this nation’s heart” by sticking with the Windsors. Turnbull, who has just decried Australian knighthoods such as that awarded to Charles’s father, Philip, last Australia Day as an “anachronism” and scrapped the honours while metaphorically slapping down his predecessor and arch-monarchist, Tony Abbott.



Another prominent republican former PM, Paul Keating, has urged Turnbull to prosecute a change to a republic, not least so Charles does not become Australia’s monarch. Federal Labor under Bill Shorten, meanwhile, also strongly advocates an Australian republic. Republicanism is now politically bipartisan.



JJ Keenan, were he to accompany Charles and Camilla on their current Australian tour, wouldn’t dare predict so boldly that the dawn will forever break on the east coast of an Australian outpost of the British empire.

A determination to lead Australia to a republic demands long-term vision. Amid all the talk of taxation and other reform, the republic may not (yet) be a stated policy priority for Turnbull, who has said the time to move would be marked with the passing of Elizabeth.



“My own view for what it is worth … is that the next occasion for the republic referendum to come up is going to be after the end of the Queen’s reign. While I am a republican there are much more immediate issues,” he said after taking the prime ministership from Abbott.



While I am a republican there are much more immediate issues Malcolm Turnbull

It’s hard to imagine, after all the emotion and time he’s invested, that an Australian republic won’t be on his medium-term “to do” list. He is certainly the first prime minister for some time capable of delivering it: his leadership is freighted with political capital and perhaps equipped with electoral sonar to determine where Australians would like to be, culturally and in the eyes of the world, beyond the next 50 or so Newspolls.



So, yes, when they arrive in Australia on 10 November, Turnbull will greet Charles and Camilla. (And if Charles continues to live in the shadow of memories of Diana circa-1983, 1985 or 1988, in Australian eyes, spare a thought for the duchess.)

They will be just in time for Remembrance Day commemorations at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The 11 November is significant for that ceremony of solemn remembrance at Australia’s secular shrine.

But this Remembrance Day in Canberra will have an added poignancy. For it will be four decades since the Queen’s man, the vainglorious, fragile, conceited John Kerr, sacked the Whitlam government to end the Senate impasse that resulted directly from Fraser’s determination to destroy a democratically elected government by delaying its supply bills in the upper house. (Kerr, incidentally, attended the war memorial service on 11 November 1975 ahead of pre-lunch drinks in the drawing room at Yarralumla that he interrupted, briefly, to terminate Whitlam and swear in Fraser.)

Charles was drawn into the 4oth anniversary appraisals of what transpired around the dismissal, with the revelation that Kerr had discussed with him as early as August 1975, the possibility of sacking the Whitlam government. Given Fraser’s later contemplation of making Charles governor general, the revelation holds a certain historic frisson.



Turnbull will launch another book about the dismissal that same day. So he and Charles will have much to discuss.



And on that front, here’s another potential talking point for them: the King George statue that stood from 1953 on the Canberra land axis. It blocked the view across the valley (which later became the lake) that draws the eye up the continuation of the axis along Anzac Parade to the Australian War Memorial.



Robert Menzies – Australia’s longest serving PM, an avowed monarchist who inspired Howard who inspired Abbott, was by then ensconced in his second prime ministerial stint. He felt the King George V memorial rather spoilt the view. So he ordered it moved to where it stands today, sidelined near the trees. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy long ago, thankfully, and appropriately, took its place.



It would’ve been unthinkable for anyone else to do that. Nobody challenged Menzies. He had the capital.



While looking at JJ Keenan’s writings on the putative King George V’s 1901 visit to Australia, I couldn’t resist another diary that’s also in the possession of the national library.

It is an “unofficial diary” of the visit to Australia in 1920 of Edward, another Prince of Wales, the son of King George V and the future Edward VIII.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, and finally the Duke of Windsor, pictured as a young man in military uniform. Lord Louis Mountbatten wrote disparagingly of Australians on a visit to the country with the prince. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

The unofficial diarist was, as it turns out, his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten.



It is imbued with enough Wooster-ish arrogance, entitlement and colonial condescension to stoke the smouldering embers of fire in the hearts of dormant republicans. They are the people, of course, that enthusiastic new ARM chairman Peter FitzSimons seeks to stir while that monolith of Australian conservative monarchism, David Flint, continues to declare that the push to oust the Queen is as dead as the Union Jack might soon be on the New Zealand flag.



The tour, especially in Melbourne, seems to have revolved around endless boozing and suppers and mindless speeches, and events with dull, uncouth war veterans.



“The children sang ‘God Save the Prince of Wales’ amazingly out of tune, and it was thought that this was due to their having no band to accompany them; but when the band struck up later, it turned out to have been lucky for the school children that they had not had the band to make it even worse,” cousin Louis observed.



At a Retired Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia dinner, Mountbatten recalled, the league president spoke “a long drawn out and somewhat pointless tale about HRH in France, which, however, raised a good laugh by a remark which occurred in it: ‘The Australians saluted.’”



(Guffaw, guffaw.)



Mountbatten and the prince seemed to loathe Melbourne’s mayors. He noted of one: “The mayor arose and having asked for all to charge their glasses – which was impossible, as there was no more champagne – he proceeded to explain, as many others had done before him, that he was not going to make a speech”.



And of another: “Here the fat little mayor presented HRH with an address.”



And another: “One of the mayors got up and took five minutes to say that he was only allowed a minute to make his speech in.”



Australian republic: time for 'high-brow worthiness' over, says Peter FitzSimons Read more

Saturday 29 May 1920, was particularly arduous for the prince, who drank toasts at one evening function and carried on after losing his new hat before going to a 12-course dinner (“the table was made in the shape of a boomerang … but after the meat course ‘The King’ was drunk and smoking started and the last three or four courses was cut out”). Then to another dinner with the press where “words failed him half-way through” his speech then on to a “long and heavy supper at the Lord Mayoral Ball”.



The prime minister, Billy Hughes, was, rather tediously it seems, ever at the prince’s elbow and was, according to Mountbatten, booed incessantly. But this, he noted, “in no way interfered with HRH’s cheers”.



“As ‘Billy’ Hughes is exceedingly deaf he probably thought that he was being cheered as well”.

Yes – Australian prime ministers and princes of Wales go back a way now.