King Charles visited Australia’s capital Canberra on Monday, where he was sneezed on by a suit-wearing alpaca, heckled by an Indigenous senator, and applauded for a speech on the country’s climate perils.
The 75-year-old sovereign is on a nine-day jaunt through Australia and Samoa, the first major foreign tour since his life-changing cancer diagnosis earlier this year.
One of the busiest days in a schedule pared back to manage his fragile health, the centrepiece was a packed address given to lawmakers gathered in the parliament’s Great Hall.
The monarch urged Australia — a longtime climate laggard with an economy geared around mining and coal — to assume the mantle of global leadership in the race to slash emissions.
“It’s in all our interests to be good stewards of the world,” Charles said in a speech that drew hearty applause.
The “magnitude and ferocity” of natural disasters was accelerating, said Charles, who described the “roll of unprecedented events” as “an unmistakable sign of climate change”.
He paid particular tribute to Indigenous “traditional owners of the lands” who had “loved and cared for this continent for 65,000 years”.
But as the clapping receded, an Indigenous lawmaker drew gasps with her own interjection.
“Give us our land back!” screamed independent senator Lidia Thorpe, who had earlier turned her back on the king as the dignitaries stood for the national anthem.
“This is not your land, you are not my king,” Thorpe added, decrying what she described as a “genocide” of Indigenous Australians by European settlers.
– An alpaca audience –
In a brief moment of levity during an otherwise weighty address, Charles spoke fondly of his teenage experiences as a student in rural Victoria.
This included “being given unmentionable parts of a bull calf to eat from a branding fire in outback Queensland”.
He might have added a bizarre interaction earlier that very morning.
Greeting supporters on a rope line at the Australian War Memorial, Charles stopped to admire a pet alpaca clad in a gold crown and suit.
The alpaca — named “Hephner” — sneezed on the king after he reached out to rub his nose.
The rest of the day was set aside for causes close to the monarch’s heart — conservation and climate change.
A lifelong greenie, Charles’ passion for conservation once saw him painted as a bit of an oddball.
He famously converted an Aston Martin DB6 to run on ethanol from leftover cheese and white wine, and once confessed that he talked to plants to help them grow.
– ‘Climate king’ –
But his climate advocacy — which has seen him dubbed the “climate king” — is sure to resonate in a country increasingly scarred by fire and flood.
Charles visited a purpose-built lab at Australia’s public science agency, which is used to study the bushfires that routinely ravage swathes of the country.
There he ignited the “pyrotron”, a 29-metre (95-foot) long combustion wind tunnel built to study bushfire behaviour.
Later he strolled through plots of native flowers at Australia’s national botanic garden, discussing how a heating planet would imperil the country’s many unique species.
Many of Australia’s state premiers skipped a reception for the king hosted at parliament.
Tied up with overseas travel, elections, and other pressing government business — their absence suggested the throne does not have the pulling power of old.
Australians, while marginally in favour of the monarchy, are far from the enthusiastic loyalists they once were.
A recent poll showed about a third of Australians would like to ditch the monarchy, a third would keep it, and a third are ambivalent.
Visiting British royals have typically carried out weeks-long visits to stoke support, parading through streets packed with thrilled, flag-waving subjects.
But the king’s health this time around has seen much of the typical grandeur scaled back.
Aside from a community barbecue in Sydney and an event at the city’s famed opera house, there will be few mass public gatherings.
sft/arb/fox
