It’s amazing what a difference 30 years makes.
In less than a week, King Charles will pause his cancer treatment to make the long trip to Australia and Samoa, proof, if ever needed, that he just wants to get on with the business of being monarch.
Love Australia. She spent six months at school here, where she revealed that “the pieces of Pommy were taken away from me.” However, as officials here ripen avocados to the newly revealed King’s taste at lunchtime, it is fascinating to recall a similar visit he made in 1994.
It was a notable tour for the then Prince of Wales and not just because a student shot him twice with a pistol as he prepared to present prizes to schoolchildren in Sydney’s Darling Harbour.
He was unharmed and apparently not upset, with video from the moment showing him fiddling with his twins.
Prince Charles loves Australia and even attended Geelong High School in Victoria in 1966.
During the 1994 tour, a student fired two shots at Charles with a pistol as he prepared to present prizes to schoolchildren in Sydney’s Darling Harbour.
The then-prince agreed to an interview with A Current Affair’s Ray Martin to talk about how the tour was “not a holiday.”
Charles gets off a plane to continue his tour of Australia and New Zealand
He seemed agitated at times during the tour, which included a visit to Brisbane.
Rather, a lengthy television interview during that same visit reveals that the Prince, 45, is as petulant and self-pitying as Prince Harry is now.
In a conversation with veteran Australian broadcaster Ray Martin, the Prince of Wales appears dejected, agile, disenchanted with being royal and so contemptuous of the media that if you closed your eyes you could be listening to his youngest son.
A real tour, he tells Martin, is not “a vacation,” and even if he had wanted to enjoy more time indoors, he wasn’t in charge of the itinerary. Regarding the prospect of Australia becoming a republic, which would eventually lead to the 1999 referendum in which the vote was split between 55 and 45 per cent in favor of the country remaining a constitutional monarchy, the Prince responded in a bad mood that his family did not. own the place’. As he snapped, “It’s not like we’re making money off of it.”
But like Harry, who is still caught in a war with the press, it is the media that the recently estranged Prince didn’t have time for 30 years ago. When asked if the royal tour, which also took place in New Zealand, was a public relations exercise, Charles fumed that the media had “written the agenda nine times out of ten before going anywhere”. Furthermore, he stated, they had created “a soap opera that has very little relationship with reality.”
While time would reveal that the press had a very accurate understanding of reality, what is fascinating after three decades is how much happier he is now. The 1990s were a horrendous decade for the heir to the throne with the publication of Diana, her true story in 1992, the royal couple’s divorce that same year and the intercepted ‘tamtengate’ phone call between Charles and Camilla published for the first time in Australia in January. 1993 before being followed by the British tabloids that same month. Visiting Australia just a year later, it’s understandable why he was so irritated and miserable.
Comparing that despondent man to the one we see now is instructive not only because it compares the changes in the King’s life but also indicates how Prince Harry’s life may evolve.
An unhappy looking Prince Harry with photographers during his tour of South Africa in 2019
Harry at a rugby event at Buckingham Palace in 2020 before leaving Britain with his family
The Prince sat down with Anderson Cooper and spoke about his childhood, the loss of his mother and the break with the Royal Family during an interview for US television last year.
The Duke of Sussex explained to Tom Bradby the criticism of his father and his decision to leave the United Kingdom with his wife Meghan during another television interview to publicize his new book.
At that time, the Prince who sat down to be interviewed in front of a large vase with carnations and gladioli, could not imagine that three decades later he would visit Camilla, his then lover, as his wife and Queen.
As the King expands his four core values – climate, community, culture and Commonwealth – to also include cancer, this will be the first time we see him meet medical experts whose work directly relates to his own health. He will meet Professor Georgina Long AO and Professor Richard Scolyer AO, named Australians of the Year for their groundbreaking research into the treatment of melanoma. Scolyer, who is on his own cancer journey, is expected to inspire the King with his story, which includes regular updates on Instagram. Meanwhile, the Queen will take part in a panel on domestic violence and promote her interest in children’s literacy by meeting children taking part in a Commonwealth reading challenge.
While Australians would love nothing more than to see the King enjoy a repeat of his swim at Bondi Beach on a previous visit in 1977, there is goodwill towards the couple after the Royal Family’s year of cancer.
Likewise, looking at the changes in Charles’s life between this visit and 1994 illustrates that royalty plays a long game. Perhaps such a graphic comparison also offers hope that Harry and William will eventually reconcile.