King Charles III wrapped up an 11-day tour to Australia and Samoa on Saturday, his first major foreign trip since being diagnosed with cancer eight months ago.
Here are some notable moments from the royal tour:
– Alpaca my bags –
Visiting the Australian capital Canberra, Charles joked about past encounters with Australia’s formidable wildlife — brown snakes, leeches, funnel web spiders and bull ants.
What he did not tell lawmakers was he had just had another character-forming encounter with an animal.
Working a rope line outside the Australian parliament he happened upon a nine-year-old suit-and-crown-wearing alpaca named Hephner.
Charles stopped to admire a sartorially suave camelid and gave him a quick rub on the nose.
However, that caused Hephner to sneeze all over the king and his bodyguard who was also in the line of fire.
– Never was, never will be –
The centrepiece of his Canberra trip was an address given to lawmakers who packed into the parliament’s Great Hall.
His remarks on the threat of climate change and a tribute to Indigenous “traditional owners of the lands” who had “loved and cared for this continent for 65,000 years” were politely received.
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.
– ‘High chief’ –
On landing in Samoa, King Charles found himself sitting before two lines of bare-chested, heavily tattooed Pacific Islanders.
He had been invited to take part in a traditional kava-drinking ceremony.
Wearing a white safari-style suit, the 75-year-old king sat at the head of a carved timber longhouse where he was presented with a polished half-coconut filled with a narcotic kava brew.
The peppery, slightly intoxicating root drink is a key part of Pacific culture and is known locally as “ava”.
After an elaborate ceremony, a Samoan man screamed as he decanted the drink, which was finally presented to the king.
Charles uttered the words: “May God Bless this ava” before gamely lifting it to his lips.
arb/fox
