Prince Charles' 60th Birthday and the Australian media

Prince Charles, Australia’s future King, will turn 60 on 14th November. The Australian media get ready for the birthday celebrations in a way they deem appropriate. And as always, “Melbourne personality and columnist Barry Everingham” acts as leader of the pack in hunting down the heir to the throne. Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday HeraldSun of 26th October 2008 contained the article Royal affair killed Kanga that was originally published on 11th October by Christopher Wilson in Britain’s The Daily Mail The lonely death of Charles’s other mistress. Strangely enough, the Sunday HeraldSun gives credit to a “Charles Wilson”. Obviously the Australian journalists were so obsessed with the name Charles, that they accidentally replaced Christopher with the Prince of Wales’ first name.

Except some minor editing the original article was copied, however the new headline had a malicious accusation. And there was another major change: The opinion of Barry Everingham … a Melbourne-based republican and a commentator on royalty, as he was previously introduced by the HeraldSun, was fiddled into what was a personal testimony of Christopher/Charles Wilson on the life of Lady Dale Tryon. She was born in 1947 to a wealthy Melburnian family and died aged only 50 in 1997. The article infers that Lady Tryon’s “beauty and Australian informality” won the Prince’s heart. “Did we know that her nickname Kanga came from HRH’s very own lips?”, Wilson asks. And the speculation goes on: “She had given herself to the Prince of Wales and he had loved her, for however brief a time.” All this is far from hard evidence for anything else, but that Dale and Prince Charles were good friends.

Refering to her tragic death, Wilson recalls all her illnesses: “There was a recurrence of her childhood spina bifida and, as she fought this off, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer.” In 1996 she checked herself into Farm Place, a fashionable rehab clinic to rid herself of her dependence on painkillers. "While undergoing treatment there, Kanga fell from a window, shattering her spine." She started fantasising that someone was trying to kill her. She and her husband divorced the same year. She travelled to India, contracted an illness, returned to the UK, went to hospital and developed septicaemia and died in November 1997.

A tragic life, certainly, and a sad end to former fashion icon, but what does Melbourne-based republican and a commentator on royalty Barry Everingham make of this story? The Sunday HeraldSun: “Everingham is certain Lady Tryon was very much in love with Prince Charles and believes their relationship had an effect on her declining health. ‘Her break-up with Prince Charles may not have been the cause for her demise, but it didn't help. She had a broken heart.’''

This is just short of accusing the Prince of Wales of being responsible for Lady Tryon’s premature death. A ridiculous assumption considering her long list of illnesses that go even back to her childhood.

At least republican Barry Everingham’s efforts to manipulate an English article and use it for his own purposes are easy to unveil. Is that all Australian republicans can raise to fight the Australian Crown? Who is more dependent of "mother England"? Australian republicans can't even write their own articles. They can only add nastiness to British tabloid news items.