Contact | Katherine Times

King Charles has the hardest of all acts to follow. When the Queen died in September, there was an outpouring of grief. Hardened republicans in Australia seemed genuinely moved. The Prime Minister said: "This is a loss we feel deeply in Australia". And who would doubt him? In contrast, her eldest son does not generate great enthusiasm. A poll in December showed 49 per cent of respondents in Australia felt "favourable" towards King Charles III and 39 per cent felt "unfavourable" (with the rest saying they didn't know). That's almost a majority in favour but a long way short of unbounded approval. It was not a result to prompt street parties on the occasion of the coronation of "King Charles the Third, by Grace of God King of Australia and his other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth". "With King Charles III relatively new to his role, Australians appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach to how he handles himself as monarch, although sentiment is more on the side of favourable than unfavourable," the Ipsos pollsters concluded. There are reasons which might help explain the lack of enthusiasm. The Queen was a model of duty and restraint. It seems she never uttered a controversial public opinion in the 70 years of her reign. The only mistake was misjudging the public mood on the death of Princess Diana. The King, in contrast, has expressed opinions, among others on architecture (traditionalist) and the environment (concerned). And his stumbles have been legion. In 2015, the Guardian won a legal fight to secure and publish memos written by the then Prince Charles to the then British prime minister, Tony Blair. They became known as the Spider Memos because of Prince Charles' spidery scrawl. In them, the prince sought urgent action to improve equipment for troops fighting in Iraq. He also wanted herbal medicines made more available. You may or may not agree with those opinions but the point is that the King of Australia is meant to be above politics. The necessary royal caution about voicing opinions on matters of controversy was absent. And the styles of the two monarchs are very different. The Queen, according to Tina Brown's riveting account, The Palace Papers, would go down corridors turning off lights. She behaved as though she was brought up in the spartan era of war-time and post-war austerity. Pennies mattered even for one of the world's richest people. Prince Charles, in contrast, would insist on his own comforting paraphernalia accompanying him on visits to the houses of others, including (Tina Brown lists) "the Prince's orthopaedic bed, lavatory seat and Kleenex Velvet lavatory paper, plus two landscapes of the Scottish Highlands". And then there is the contrast between their marriages. The Queen married for love and stayed with her husband for 74 years. They were, by all accounts, head-over-heels. Charles, in contrast, married out of convenience and continued his existing affair with Camilla during his marriage to Diana. ("There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded," Princess Diana told 23 million viewers on November 5, 1995.) We even had the indignity of over-hearing Charles and Camilla's (what should have been) utterly private sexually-charged talk when a recording of a phone call was mysteriously made public. The feral British tabloids couldn't get enough of what they called "The Tampongate Scandal". The rift with Prince Harry and Meghan in a later episode of the soap opera hasn't helped either. King Charles would no doubt find the coverage deeply unfair, and he might well be right. There are no headlines for doing good deeds without publicity, and those who favour him say that he does exactly that. After race riots in Britain in 2011, he and his by-then wife Camilla visited some of the riot-torn parts of London. Unlike politicians, the prince returned again and again - without the cameras. David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham (where rioting had been fierce) told the Independent: "He has been back five times and he doesn't just come back to look at it. He's brought all his charities." The Labour MP continued: "He hasn't done it with fanfare. He hasn't put out press releases. He's just done it because he cares." So the image of the King is probably not the truth. He, like the rest of us, is a complex character. Charles Philip Arthur George seems to have been a sensitive boy. He grew up as the son of a loving father who nevertheless believed that the love should be tough. "Asked in an interview when he was 20 years old whether his father had been a 'tough disciplinarian' and whether he had been told 'to sit down and shut up,' Charles answered without hesitation: 'The whole time, yes'," Vanity Fair reported. The young prince, complete with sticky-out ears, was sent to the Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun (where his no-nonsense father had gone and where winters can be brutal). "The testing began with the boys' attire (short trousers throughout the year) and the living conditions (open windows at all times in the grim dormitories). The day began with a run before breakfast, followed by a frigid shower," as Vanity Fair describes it. The toughening (or lack of it) continued in Australia when, in 1966 at the suggestion of the prime minister Robert Menzies, the 17-year-old prince arrived for two terms at Timbertop, a remote outpost of the ultra-exclusive Geelong Grammar. "Timbertop was all about physical challenges," Sally Bedell Smith wrote in The Lonely Heir. "He undertook cross-country expeditions in blistering heat, logging 70 miles in three days - climbing five peaks along the way - and spending nights freezing in a sleeping bag. "He encountered leeches, snakes, bull ants, and funnel-web spiders, and joined the other students in chopping and splitting wood, feeding pigs, and cleaning out fly traps." But it did change him. "I learnt an enormous amount in Australia and discovered just how direct and friendly and straightforward and so often blunt Australians are. But with such an incredibly good sense of humour." But from Timbertop to the throne was an awfully long wait. He spent longer as the heir-in-waiting than any other British monarch. When he finally became king, he had been heir apparent for 70 years and 214 days, right through his childhood, youth, and all the ages of man up to old age (he is now 74). Seven decades of waiting is a long time in which to make mistakes. He has lived through a time, too, where the monarchy is hounded by a rapacious press. The old respect and privacy has long gone. (Camilla's great-grandmother, for example, was the mistress of King Edward VII for 12 years but privacy, at least to the king's subjects in Britain and Australia, was maintained). So King Charles has ground to make up, and to do so in much more brutal, unforgiving times. The latest Australian poll shows Charles and Camilla - the King and Queen Consort of Australia - as far less popular than the Prince and Princess of Wales (William and Catherine). The invitations to the coronation refer to "Queen Camilla", dropping the word "consort". It doesn't change her powers but it did mark a big step towards rehabilitating her image, or at least trying to. Perhaps King Charles should present himself as some sort of interim monarch, with his telegenic eldest son and daughter-in-law waiting to take over. "They are one of the best tools the royal family have in their toolbox," Jess Carniel, senior lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, thinks. One way of improving his image in Australia might be to continue his activist tendency, according to Cindy McCreery, the convener of the Modern Monarchy in Global Perspective Research Hub at the University of Sydney. "He has a big challenge reaching out to young Australians," Dr McCreery said. But she thinks that his long-standing concern for the environment might help. "If he could show that he was promoting meaningful change, that would go down incredibly well." Dr McCreery thinks the King and Queen Consort should visit Australia, even with the risk of protests. Being forthright about the colonial mistreatment of Indigenous people might also help, according to the associate professor of history. Dr McCreery concedes that this would be "tricky" because the King would have to stay well clear of Australian politics - he could not, for example, go anywhere near an opinion on the Voice. But a more subtle intervention might help. "If Charles could be seen to take a leadership role in addressing the hurt caused by colonialism in Australia, that would promote leadership and generate respect." The Queen's popularity neutralised the issue of the republic in Australia. That may not now be so under King Charles. "While certain factions did question the institution of the monarchy under Queen Elizabeth, her sentimental popularity possibly stopped this from becoming a significant public movement in many places," Dr Carniel said. "Now, with a monarch that people are less sentimentally attached too, people may also view the institution itself a little differently." The coronation is a big step towards keeping Australia as a monarchy - or not.

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