Royal tours of Australia: Security scares, a kiss and the baby republican slayer

The King is embarking on his 16th official visit and 17th overall to Australia – but his first as the country’s monarch.

Camilla reacts as she and Charles hold koalas on a visit to Adelaide in 2018 (Chris Radburn/PA) (PA Archive)

A beach-side kiss from a model in a bikini, a shooting security scare and a formative teenage trip to the Outback are just some of the King’s experiences in Australia over the years.

Charles is embarking on his 16th official visit and 17th overall to Australia – and his first as the country’s monarch and for Queen Camilla in her role as consort.

The pair last travelled around the globe to the Commonwealth realm in 2018.

The prince was pictured in a feather headdress known as a mulka string and was given a spiritual blessing by the world didgeridoo master in the small Aboriginal community of Yirrkala in Northeast Arnhem Land.

Camilla paddled barefoot on Broadbeach on the Gold Coast – but Charles kept his brogues on – and the couple attended the Commonwealth Games.

In 2015, Charles and Camilla were given their own elaborate boomerangs by a local artist during a visit to Kings Park in Perth, Western Australia.

A Diamond Jubilee tour in 2012 saw Charles and Camilla cuddle koalas at Government House in Adelaide, with Charles quipping “something ominous will run down” about the animals’ reputation for having weak bladders.

As a 17-year-old prince, Charles spent two terms at Timbertop, a remote outpost of the Geelong Church of England Grammar School in Melbourne in 1966 as an exchange student.

Afterwards, he described it as a “most wonderful experience”.

He swam on the Barrier Reef, ran cattle in Queensland and attended a feast in New Guinea.

But he admitted that on occasions he was referred to by the traditional Australian epithet “pommy bastard”.

His first official visit to Australia came in 1970 when he and sister Princess Anne joined Queen Elizabeth II’s tour.

In 1979, the eligible bachelor prince returned to represent his mother for the 150th anniversary of the state of Western Australia.

But the visit is famous for an encounter he had with a bikini-clad woman on a beach.

Charles was pounced on by model Jane Priest while taking an early morning dip, and images of the wave-side kiss were printed around the world.

Ms Priest later divulged the incident on Cottesloe Beach in Perth was a publicity stunt to try to make Charles appear more accessible.

She also recalled how the “adorable” prince told her when she put her hands on his chest: “I can’t touch you.”

Within four years, Charles had married Lady Diana Spencer and they had welcomed his first child, Prince William.

The Prince and Princess of Wales undertook a six-week tour to Australia and New Zealand in 1983.

But in a modern move, going against royal convention, they took their baby son with them on the long-haul journey, rather than leaving him behind in the UK with nannies.

Ten-month-old William attended a photocall and crawled across a rug on the lawns of Government House in Auckland, New Zealand, watched by his parents.

Charles and Diana’s tours to Australia were, however, subject to tension.

Diana told her biographer Andrew Morton that she was thrown into the deep end and overwhelmed by the adulation she faced from the crowds in 1983 during her first major overseas trip, while Charles became jealous at the attention she received.

In 1988, the pair were pictured standing side by side in the sunshine in Wollongong, south of Sydney – but by then their relationship was in tatters.

Charles had already turned to his now-wife Camilla Parker Bowles and Diana was having an affair with cavalry officer James Hewitt.

More than 30 years after the Waleses took William to Australia, he returned with his own son Prince George and wife the then-Duchess of Cambridge.

They embarked on a royal tour to Australia and New Zealand in 2014.

Nine-month-old George was dubbed the “republican slayer” for boosting the monarchy’s appeal on his first official overseas tour.

He met a bilby named after him, stole another baby’s toy on a play date and, according to his mother Kate, gained an extra fat roll while he was away.

Royal baby news coincided with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s 2018 tour, with Harry and Meghan announcing she was pregnant on the eve of a high-profile 16-day trip to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga.

Highlights saw the Sussexes take a trip to Bondi beach where they were presented with garlands and sat on the sand to meet members of surfing community group One Wave.

Harry ran into difficulties during his gap year in 2003 when he worked as a jackaroo – an Australian cowboy – on a cattle ranch in Queensland.

He was besieged by photographers, sparking fears he might have to abandon the trip.

Sydney meanwhile was the scene of a major royal security scare for Harry’s father.

In 1994, there were dramatic scenes when student David Kang was wrestled to the ground after firing a starting pistol as Charles stood to make a speech.

The late Queen was the first reigning monarch to set foot in Australia, and made 16 trips in total – the first in 1954 and her last in 2011.

There was controversy during the Queen and Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh’s Golden Jubilee tour of 2002 when Philip asked an Aboriginal businessman: “Do you still throw spears at each other?”

Aboriginal cultural park owner William Brim replied: “No, we don’t do that any more.”

Mr Brim, who met the duke during a royal visit to the Tjapukai Aboriginal Park in northern Cairns, branded Philip a “larrikin” (joker) and said he was not offended but described the question as “naive”.

On a tour by the Queen in 1992, the country’s then premier Paul Keating was dubbed the “Lizard of Oz” after cameras caught him giving the monarch a helping hand at Canberra’s Parliament House by touching her back.

Charles III is now King of Australia, but his mother once thought about giving him a different job while he was waiting to accede to the throne.

She considered him as a future governor-general of Australia – the Queen’s representative in the realm – but only once he was married, archive documents from the 1970s suggested.

Speculation in the press had reached the prince, then a Royal Navy officer, who said in a interview if there was interest in him taking up the role he would be “delighted to consider it”.