Its not as if were making money out of it: How Prince Charles revealed his true feelings about Australia in a VERY candid interview in 1994

It’s astonishing the difference 30 years makes.

In less than a week, King Charles will be pausing his cancer treatment to make the long trip to Australia and Samoa, proof if ever it was needed that he just wants to get on with the business of being monarch.

He adores Australia. He spent six months at school here where he’s revealed he had the Pommy bits bashed off me. Yet while officials here ripen avocados so they are to the King’s recently revealed lunchtime liking, it’s fascinating to recall a similar visit he made back in 1994.

It was a notable tour for the then Prince of Wales and not just because a student fired two shots at him with a pistol while he was preparing to present prizes to school children at Sydney’s Darling Harbour. 

He was unharmed and seemingly unbothered, with video from the time showing him twiddling his cufflinks.

Prince Charles adores Australia and even attended the Geelong Grammar School in Victoria  in 1966

During the 1994 tour, a student fired two shots at Charles with a pistol while he was preparing to present prizes to schoolchildren at Sydney’s Darling Harbour

The then-prince agreed to an interview with A Current Affairs Ray Martin to talk about how the tour was not a holiday 

 Charles steps off a plane to continue his tour of Australia and New Zealand 

He looked agitated at certain points during the tour, which included a visit to Brisbane

Rather, a lengthy television interview during that same visit reveals the 45-year-old Prince to be as petulant and self-pitying as Prince Harry is now.

In conversation with Australia’s veteran broadcaster, Ray Martin, the Prince of Wales is despondent, snappy, disenchanted with being royal and so contemptuous of the media that if you close your eyes you could be listening to his younger son.

A royal tour, he tells Martin, is not a holiday and even if he had wanted to enjoy more time in the Outback, he wasn’t in charge of the itinerary. As for the prospect of Australia becoming a republic, which would eventually lead to the 1999 referendum which saw the vote split nearly 55 to 45 per cent in favour of the country remaining a constitutional monarchy, the Prince responded grumpily that his family didn’t ‘own the place’. As he snapped: ‘It’s not as if we’re making money out of it.’

But just like Harry who is still locked in a war with the Press, it’s the media that the recently separated Prince had no time for 30 years ago. When asked whether the royal tour, which also took in New Zealand, was a PR exercise, Charles fumed that the media has written the agenda nine times out of 10 before you go anywhere. They had also, he claimed, created a soap opera which bears very little relation to reality.

While time would reveal that the Press had a very accurate grasp of reality, what’s fascinating three decades on is how much happier he is now. The 1990s was an horrendous decade for the heir to the throne with the publication of Diana, Her True Story in 1992, the royal couple’s divorce later that year, and the intercepted ‘tampongate’ phone call between Charles and Camilla first published in Australia in January 1993 before being followed up by British tabloids later that month. Visiting Australia just a year later, it’s understandable why he was so irritated and miserable.

Comparing that despondent man with the one we see now, is instructive not only because it benchmarks the changes in the King’s life but indicates how life may evolve for Prince Harry.

An unhappy looking Prince Harry with photographers during his tour of South Africa in 2019

 Harry at a rugby event at Buckingham Palace in 2020 before leaving Britain with his family

The Prince sat down with Anderson Cooper and talked about his childhood, the loss of his mother and the rift with the Royal Family during a interview for American TV last year

The Duke of Sussex explained criticisms of his father and his decision to leave the UK with his wife Meghan to Tom Bradby during another TV interview to publicise his new book

Back then, the Prince who sat down to be interviewed in front of a large vase of carnations and gladioli, could not have imagined that three decades later he would be visiting with Camilla, his then lover, as his wife and Queen.

With the King extending his four core values – climate, community, culture and Commonwealth – to also include cancer, this will be the first time we see him meeting medical experts whose work directly relates to his own health. He will meet Professor Georgina Long AO and Professor Richard Scolyer AO, named Australians of the Year for their ground-breaking research into melanoma treatment. Scolyer, who is on his own cancer journey, is expected to inspire the King with his story which includes regular updates on Instagram. The Queen, meanwhile, will take part in a panel on domestic violence and will further her interest in childhood literacy by meeting children taking part in a Commonwealth reading challenge.

While Australians would love nothing more than seeing the King enjoy a repeat of his swim at Bondi Beach on an earlier visit in 1977, there is goodwill towards the couple after the Royal Family’s cancer-stricken year.

Likewise, observing the changes in Charles’s life between this visit and 1994 illustrates that the royals play a long game. Perhaps such a graphic comparison also offers hope that Harry and William will eventually reconcile.