The last time the Sussexes visited Australia in 2018, they were newly married, popular, and—somehow—still very much inside the royal fold. None of those things is true any more. Even so, this still looks a lot like a royal visit, even though it’s officially not.
Harry and Meghan will travel using their titles of Duke and Duchess of Sussex, spending much of the week moving through charities and causes they’ve aligned with. It begins today at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital, then the duchess heads to a women’s homeless and family violence shelter. Later, there’s an event this evening with the families of war veterans. And you can almost picture the rhythm: arrivals, handshakes, the careful pauses—though the mood now is different, less “welcome back” and more “okay, what’s this really about?”
Tomorrow, Harry appears at a Movember event at Melbourne’s Whitten Oval with players from the Western Bulldogs AFL team, before flying to Canberra for events at the Australian War Memorial. There, he will meet Indigenous veterans and attend a Last Post ceremony. On Thursday, they’re back in Melbourne for Indigenous and mental health events, before heading to Sydney on Friday to promote Invictus Australia, the veterans’ charity he founded.
But if this is a tour in the public imagination, it has a few sharp corners that don’t match the traditional script. A media statement issued before their arrival says the program “will focus on mental health, community resilience, and support for veterans and their families, alongside private meetings and special projects”. Those “private meetings and special projects” matter—because they include two big, ticketed events. Harry will deliver a speech at a conference in Melbourne on Thursday, while Meghan is the star attraction at a luxury wellness event at Coogee Beach in Sydney next weekend.
A ticket to Meghan’s event—branded “a girls’ weekend like no other” and involving a gala dinner, yoga, meditation and “sound healing”—is priced between $2,699 and $3,199. That’s the sort of detail that sticks in your head, especially if you’ve just walked past a fundraiser table outside a community venue and smelled that mix of coffee and rain. The Sussexes’ day-to-day schedule also differs from their official royal tour seven years ago.
According to the media statement, the couple have included private events “to support broader commercial, charitable, and community objectives”, and adds they’re “separate from the core programme of public-facing visits.” Still, the question of whether this is publicity, or something closer to it, doesn’t really go away. Misryoum newsroom reporting and analysis points to the same tension: a visit framed as listening and support, while running parallel to expensive ticketed moments.
Royal expert Giselle Bastin, from Flinders University, described the commercial aspect of the tour as “unusual” and said the royals would not be impressed that the Sussexes were “monetising their visit to Australia”. She argued that because they are not working royals and are staging this visit as a quasi-royal tour, “the Windsors nonplussed,” and that Australians—many of whom were once big fans—may now be more skeptical. British journalist and royal commentator Afua Hagan, meanwhile, suggested criticism would likely come regardless, saying the press target would probably be vilified either way: if there’s commercial interest, it’s “leeching”; if there isn’t, then somehow it’s still a problem. In the UK, favourability trackers suggest just 31 per cent and 19 per cent of the public have a positive view of Harry and Meghan, respectively, with their ratings only higher than disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Dr Bastin said the tour was being poorly perceived in the UK, with tabloids “having its usual field day” about not “read[ing] the room,” especially because King Charles III is due to visit the USA for the 250th celebration of American Independence. And just in case it needed a reminder, the prince has long criticised the UK’s tabloid press—telling a British court this year certain outlets had left him “paranoid beyond belief” while making his wife’s life “an absolute misery”. Whether this Australia week changes any minds… actually, it might not. Or maybe it will, but only for a while, and then the story moves on.
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