Royal Tours of Australia: Security Fears, a Kiss and the Little Republican Huntress

A kiss on the beach from a model in a bikini, a shootout in front of a security guard and a formative teenage trip to the outback are just some of the experiences the King has had in Australia over the years.

Charles is making 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 prince was pictured wearing a feather headdress known as a mulka string and receiving a spiritual blessing from 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.

On a Diamond Jubilee tour in 2012, Charles and Camilla cuddled koalas at Government House in Adelaide, with Charles quipping: “Something disastrous is going to happen” about the animals’ reputation for having weak bladders.

He then described it as “the most wonderful experience.”

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

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

However, the visit is famous for his encounter with a woman in a bikini on the beach.

Charles was attacked by model Jane Priest while taking an early morning swim and pictures of the wave kiss went around the world.

Ms Priest later revealed the incident on Perth’s Cottesloe Beach was a publicity stunt to make Charles appear more approachable.

She also remembered how the “adorable” prince told her as she placed her hands on his chest, “I can’t touch you.”

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

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

Ten-month-old William took part in a photocall, crawling across a carpet on the lawn of Government House in Auckland, New Zealand, as his parents watched.

However, Charles and Diana’s trips to Australia were fraught with tension.

Diana told her biographer Andrew Morton that during her first major trip abroad in 1983, she was thrown in at the deep end and overwhelmed by the admiration of the crowd, while Charles became jealous of the attention she received.

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 brought William to Australia, he returned with his own son, Prince George, and his wife, the then Duchess of Cambridge.

Nine-month-old George was dubbed a “republican murderer” for boosting the monarchy’s appeal on his first official trip abroad.

He met a bilby named after him, stole another baby’s toy at a playdate and, according to his mother Kate, got an extra big bun while he was away.

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

During his year abroad in 2003, Harry got into trouble while working as a jackaroo – an Australian cowboy – on a cattle farm in Queensland.

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

In 1994, there were dramatic scenes when student David Kang was knocked to the ground after firing a starter pistol while Charles stood up to give a speech.

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

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

During a trip by the Queen in 1992, the country’s then-Prime Minister Paul Keating was dubbed the “Lizard of Oz” after cameras caught him shaking hands with the monarch at Parliament House in Canberra touched.

She considered him to be Australia’s future governor-general – the Queen’s representative in the realm – but only after his marriage, according to archival documents from the 1970s.

Press speculation had reached the prince, then an officer in the Royal Navy, who said in an interview that if there was interest in him taking on the role he would be “very happy to think about it”.