The mugs have sold out, the T-shirts are on a second print run and the tea towels are rapidly becoming collector’s items. But the face smiling from these personalised souvenirs of a royal tour is not that of the middle-aged heir to the British throne, it is of a young, glamorous Australian princess.
Having travelled 19 200km for his first official tour of Australia in 11 years, the Prince of Wales’ six-day visit risks being eclipsed by the simultaneous presence of a Tasmanian estate agent turned crown princess, who is known affectionately in these parts as ”our blessed Mary” and perhaps more disturbingly for the prince, the Aussie Diana.
Mary Donaldson (33) became a royal after meeting Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark in a bar during the Sydney Olympics. They married last year and she is with him in Australia for his first official tour since their wedding.
While the new crown princess joins her husband in yacht races across Sydney harbour watched by thousands, Prince Charles attracts no more than crowds of 200 and prefers the delights of visiting a bush toilet and examining the culinary possibilities of the witchetty grub in the outback.
”Like an all-night rave being interrupted by God Save the Queen,” was how one Australian newspaper described Prince Charles’s arrival on the scene in the midst of the tour by the crown prince and his wife.
Mary’s face stares from front pages, centre pages and magazines under headlines which read: ”Mary and Fred. How can we resist a royal love affair?”
What Mary did, what Mary did next and even what she had for breakfast — poached eggs and muesli to keep her slimline figure — are rehearsed in detail.
In contrast, the groom-to-be, on his last tour before marrying Camilla Parker Bowles on April 8, cannot escape headlines which put chaos and marriage in the same sentence.
Two polls, which show support for a republic in Australia has risen to between 57% and 60%, suggested the increase in anti-monarchist sentiment is partly down to the fiasco over the wedding, questions about its legality and a resistance among women in particular to endorse the prince’s marriage to Parker Bowles.
”It’s a hard act to follow for Prince Charles,” said Eddie Nicholls, a town councillor in Alice Springs. ”This is a beautiful young woman with her good-looking husband. Everyone loves her because she is an Aussie princess.”
But those who turned out to welcome the prince when he arrived on Wednesday in Alice Springs on the fourth day of his tightly scheduled tour, were fiercely loyal. ”Jeez, how hot does it have to be for him to take his tie off?” one observer noted.
Even as they wilted in temperatures of 38C, Noel Harris and his friend Joan Furletti did not care that the prince had shunned casual for buttoned-up.
Hit and run
They would not have missed the chance to peer through the airport’s perimeter fence to catch a distant glimpse of Prince Charles disembarking from a 737 jet 100m in the distance.
For this, it seems, is how the prince’s tour is being organised. Politicians term it the ”hit and run”, visiting a city for just a few hours, often in a location well away from the general public and the possibility of answering awkward questions.
Last time it was different. Noel and Joan were there in 1983 when the whole town turned out to see the prince, his wife Diana and their newborn son William, and in 1977, when he attracted crowds of several hundred.
At its height on Wednesday the crowd at Alice Springs airport swelled to 40 to watch from behind the fence as five middle-aged bare-breasted Aboriginal women performed a somewhat perfunctory dance of welcome.
The town had been hoping for a glimpse of the prince later in the day. They were waiting a few kilometres away in the centre of Alice Springs at the Bojangles bar, where the mayor and the owner were throwing a stag party for the prince. ”We sent him an invite,” said Nicholls, who helped organise the event. ”We’ve got the red carpet and everything, we just want to drink a toast to the guy and show him a good ‘buck’s do’ Alice-style.
”I feel sorry for him that he can’t relax and let his hair down once in a while.”
Sticking to his tight schedule, the prince declined the invitation and instead the town had to make do with a lookalike Prince of Wales and a lookalike Queen. ”Since she’s not going to the wedding, we thought she’d better come to the stag,” Nicholls said.
Ted Egan, the administrator of the Northern Territory, told the party later in the evening that the prince was sorry he had not been able to make it. Touched by the town’s gesture, he had given Egan £100 to put behind the bar.
At the moment the tins of beer had been cracked open at 4pm, the prince had been several miles away inside a sustainable bush toilet which resembled the Tardis in Dr Who.
Tens of thousands of miles away from the problems over his wedding, he appeared relaxed and jovial. Popping his head out of the toilet, he joked: ”You should all try it.”
Not so the witchetty grubs, however. Presented with the live grub alongside other outback foods like wild peach, honey ants and bush bananas, he declined: ”I’m older and wiser now,” he said.
Mention of the wedding was out of bounds. It was a subject that would not be discussed during his 12-day antipodean tour, said Clarence House.
But Egan could not say goodbye to Prince Charles without congratulating him on his forthcoming marriage. ”We don’t care about your background. As far as we are concerned you’re a bloody good bloke,” he added. That, at least, is one thing that will never be said about ”our blessed Mary”. – Guardian Unlimited Â