King Charles and Queen Camilla are visiting Australia. In 1983, his tour with Princess Diana was ‘utterly traumatic’

By Lucia Stein and Rebecca Armitage, ABC News

A 21-year-old on one of her first official tours abroad, Princess Diana landed in Alice Springs with one task: Shore up Australia’s fealty to the crown.

The newly minted Princess of Wales barely had time to adjust to married life before she became a mother – not to mention, the most famous woman in the world.

And in 1983, the monarchy decided to use her youthful glamour to its advantage, sending her to Australia, where resentment still simmered over the dismissal of Gough Whitlam, and voters had recently elected an avowed republican as prime minister.

Diana arrived in the Northern Territory in March that year with Prince Charles and their nine-month-old son, Prince William, in tow.

With nearly 200 outfits packed in her luggage, Diana was expected to make up to eight appearances a day alongside her husband, crisscrossing the nation on 40 flights during a gruelling, six-week long tour of Australia and New Zealand.

The new princess was determined to prove herself, but when she walked across the tarmac at Alice Springs airport, local journalists glimpsed through the veneer of feminine perfection Diana was meant to display.

“She seemed uneasy, even glum, and looked at the tarmac with downcast eyes throughout much of the brief airport picture session,” The Age reported on 21 March 1983.

“Whatever the reason, Princess Diana had to work mightily to produce for the photographers the smile of a proud and happy young mother.”

Behind closed doors, the new princess was struggling under the weight of royal expectations, worried she was performing a role she felt ill-prepared for.

Thousands of kilometres from home, Diana had no choice but to learn the ropes of royal life quickly and adapt to the glare of an intense spotlight.

And in less than a week she did, turning the tide of public opinion in her favour.

As the young royal became more and more comfortable with the massive crowds who came out to see her, she wooed Australia at charity balls, glamorous dinners and on long walks in the outback.

“The young Princess of Wales had proved she was a dazzling new PR weapon for the British crown,” biographer Tina Brown wrote in The Diana Chronicles.

The tour was an undeniable success for the palace, catapulting the royal family even more into the public eye, but Diana’s new found celebrity put her at odds with her husband.

Australia had forged the young woman into a bona fide princess, but it was also where her relationship with Charles was forever altered.

The pressure to woo a sceptical nation

When Charles and Diana’s trip to Australia was first bandied about by the Fraser government, the country was still reeling from governor general Sir John Kerr’s sacking of Gough Whitlam in 1975.

The Dismissal lingered in the national conscious, highlighting a murky constitutional predicament and fuelling anti-monarchy sentiment in some quarters of the country.

Eight years after the political crisis, Bob Hawke, a staunch republican, came to power and seemingly tapped into the public mood as he offered a rather ambivalent view of the future monarch.

Just 12 days before the royal couple was due to fly here, the new prime minister was asked if Charles would make a good king of Australia.

“I don’t think we’ll be talking about kings in Australia for ever more … we would be better off as a republic. But I don’t think it’s a matter of great importance,” he said on the Four Corners programme.

“The thing that concerns me is the condition of men and women out there in Australia. Particularly the people in poverty, the disadvantaged. If we became a republic tomorrow, it wouldn’t improve their condition one iota.”

While he had dismissed the idea of a referendum on the issue happening soon, the very fact it was a matter of public discussion was likely of concern to the palace.

And so Charles and his young wife were dispatched Down Under with the goal of winning over hearts and minds.

The pressure on the prince was immense but for his untested, newly minted wife, the expedition would be a baptism of fire.

“The tour Down Under is likely to provide the toughest test Diana has faced since she became a royal,” reporter James Whitaker wrote for UK newspaper the Daily Mirror at the time.

Diana, who was privately struggling with an eating disorder, was adjusting to her new royal role, motherhood and sudden, global fame.

When she touched down in Australia, the very country where two years earlier she had come incognito to reflect on her upcoming engagement to the heir to the throne, the princess was thrown in the “deep end”, she later told biographer Andrew Morton for his book Diana: Her True Story.

Overwhelmed by her new duties as countless cameras tracked her every move, she made her first appearance in the blazing heat of Alice Springs.

“When she walked into the media reception in the unglamorous setting of an Alice Springs hotel, she was hot, jet-lagged and sunburned,” Morton wrote in the New York Post.

“Yet she was able to charm and captivate the representatives of the Fourth Estate. Only later did I realise that the tour was utterly traumatic.”

Diana visited a school and later recalled arriving at her hotel in tears, telling her lady-in-waiting she had to go back home and could not cope with the scrutiny.

“This was the real hard crunch, the hard end of being the Princess of Wales,” she said.

Unable to return to England, Diana instead learnt how to be a ‘royal’ in “one week”, telling Morton she became a different woman to the shy young bride that first left the United Kingdom.

In the span of six weeks, the couple wooed a sceptical public to the monarchy.

The Evening Standard even declared: “This tour has set Republicanism back 10 years.”

But Diana’s success would cause tensions at home.

The star and the ‘walk-on’ prince

Every marriage is one story with two perspectives, and the ill-fated union between Charles and Diana is no different.

The attention Diana received during her first big tour was no doubt overwhelming, but she managed to dazzle the crowds that turned out to see her.

In Brisbane alone, an estimated 400,000 people came out to see the royal couple, while photographer Jayne Fincher said she was shocked by the size of the crowds who besieged Sydney Harbour for a glimpse of the princess.

“It was like a sea of people as far as you could see, not just land, but the harbour was full of boats and people,” she told Brown.

“All you could see was this little pink hat bobbing along.”

Monarchists in the country outnumbered republicans two to one by the end of the tour, according to royal biographers.

But the couple’s efforts took a toll. Three years after their marriage ended, Diana told the BBC’s Panorama programme that when she and Charles walked through a crowd of people, they would audibly groan if he went to greet them instead of her.

“All you could hear was, ‘oh, she’s on the other side.’ Now, if you’re a man – like my husband – a proud man, you mind about that, if you hear it every day for four weeks. You feel low about it, instead of feeling happy and sharing it,” she said in 1995.

“With the media attention came a lot of jealousy. A great deal of complicated situations arose because of that.”

Charles supported his wife in public, responding to the crowd’s disappointment at not seeing her with grace, but tensions simmered beneath the surface.

His biographer Sally Bedell Smith said the then-prince was “embarrassed” and “disturbed” by the attention foisted upon his young bride.

“In letters to friends, Charles described his anguish over the impact ‘all this obsessed and crazed attention was having on his wife’,” Bedell Smith wrote in her biography, Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.

In one letter to a friend on 4 April 1983, obtained by Brown, Charles said he felt “desperate” about Diana’s predicament.

“There is no twitch she can make without these ghastly, and I am quite convinced mindless people, photographing it,” he wrote.

“What has gotten into them all? How can anyone, let alone a 21-year-old, be expected to come out of this obsessed and crazed attention unscathed?”

Shocked as he was at the behaviour of the press, it was a drop in the ocean compared to the flood of publicity his wife would attract throughout their relationship.

Charles and Diana broke protocol to remain a family unit

Despite the trauma of the tour, Australia was the place where Diana discovered her superpower.

Lacking self confidence, she always found “the underdog in any room – the aged, the shy, the very young”, according to Brown.

She bent down to interact with children, she sat on the edge of patients’ hospital beds, and wrote personal notes to people she met during the tour.

Diana’s innate ability to connect with people endeared her to crowds around the country, with newspapers declaring her victory in “melting tough Aussie hearts”.

Often by her side during these moments was her husband, encouraging her and teaching her how to cope, according to Bedell Smith.

Frustrated as he may have been at his “walk on” part next to Diana during the tour, it also provided an opportunity for the couple to bond as royals and parents outside of the confines of their daily lives at home.

“The great joy was that we were totally alone together,” Charles wrote a friend, according to Smith.

At Woomargama Station in NSW, Charles and Diana watched William’s first efforts at crawling -“at high speed knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction”.

The new parents, according to Charles, “laughed and laughed with sheer, hysterical pleasure” at their son’s antics.

And at a gala in Sydney, the pair wowed onlookers as they smiled and swayed while leading the room in a ballroom dance.

The opportunity to tour the country and remain a “family unit”, which Diana said was made possible by Malcolm Fraser, provided rare glimpses into a normal family life.

Four decades later, Charles will return to Australia but this time with his wife Camilla by his side.

– ABC