King Charles visited Australia's capital Canberra on Monday, where he was sneezed on by a suit-wearing alpaca, heckled by an Indigenous senator, and applauded for a speech on the country's climate perils. The 75-year-old sovereign is on a nine-day jaunt through Australia and Samoa, the first major foreign tour since his life-changing cancer diagnosis earlier this year. One of the busiest days in a schedule pared back to manage his fragile health, the centrepiece was a packed address given to lawmakers gathered in the parliament's Great Hall.
The monarch urged Australia -- a longtime climate laggard with an economy geared around mining and coal -- to assume the mantle of global leadership in the race to slash emissions. "It's in all our interests to be good stewards of the world," Charles said in a speech that drew hearty applause. The "magnitude and ferocity" of natural disasters was accelerating, said Charles, who described the "roll of unprecedented events" as "an unmistakable sign of climate change".
He paid particular tribute to Indigenous "traditional owners of the lands" who had "loved and cared for this continent for 65,000 years". 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 .
