Most people didn’t know it had started. Princess Anne finishes what must have been one of the shortest, lowest key and most unremarkable royal visits ever especially compared with the last one by Meghan and Harry in late 2018. The official royal tour to mark our Head of State’s platinum jubilee started and ended in Sydney before the Princess jetted out to Port Moresby for another short stay. It featured more travelling in historical vehicles, a ploy that got the Cambridges into much strife in the Caribbean recently. Info about the visit is available on the link below. WfaAR can’t see that the country got much benefit from her presence other than realising a royal visit so close to the announcement of an election was publicity that the Government wanted to do without for fear of surfacing republican sentiment. This was well-founded. Definitely one for the diehard royal watchers and no one else. That there were no photo ops with the attention-seeking monarchist Prime Minister was thundering! [“Rural traditions and Australian way of life celebrated in royal tour” by Lucy Manly, “reporter and gossip columnist” for Sydney Morning Herald online, 9 April 2022]
Woman for an Australian Republic, Adelaide Ironside, republican poet and artist 1831-1867
Self portrait 1855, Newcastle Art Gallery NSW
