How common sense has gone walkabout in woke Australia: Calling cities by their Aboriginal names, treating the didgeridoo like Mozart and extreme trans rights By Terry Barnes Published: 01:11 BST, 23 September 2024 | Updated: 01:14 BST, 23 September 2024 e-mail View comments I had my first glimpse of King Charles back in 1970, when he, the late Queen, the late Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne came to Botany Bay in Sydney to celebrate the landing there, 200 years before, of Captain James Cook, who paved the way for the British settlement of Australia. Along with 100,000 onlookers, including me as a child of seven, the Royals watched a re-enactment of Cook’s arrival, which even included a token challenge by a couple of Aboriginal warriors. It was a very happy day, bursting with national pride.
This was the tour during which the tradition of the royal ‘walkabout’ was born when Daily Mail reporter, Vincent Mulchrone, used the word to describe how the Queen and Philip interacted casually with crowds. I revisited Botany Bay earlier this year, and it is now overgrown and neglected. The 250th anniversary passed in 2020 with barely any public acknowledgment.
Any mentions of it were mostly hostile and shame-faced. Cook’s landing place is a sad symbol of how Australia has changed so totally, in not so many years, from a nation proud and comfortable with its history since the British arrived, to one taught to be ashamed of that past and to see only the darkness in it . Austra.