Topless Aboriginal dancers welcomed Britain’s Prince Charles in Australia’s outback on Wednesday, where locals were preparing to throw a bachelor party for the newly engaged royal.
Charles, who is due to wed divorcee Camilla Parker-Bowles on April 8, was greeted in Alice Springs with a traditional indigenous dance to wish him a safe journey in Australia.
Locals at the outback town’s Bojangles bar were preparing to party as the future king of Australia arrived. Australia is a former British colony which retains the British monarch as its head of state.
Locals plan 'bucks night'
Although Charles will spend less than five hours in Alice Springs, 1,200 miles northwest of Sydney, locals were planning to throw the heir to the British throne an outback-style “bucks night” to celebrate his impending wedding.
“We won’t be shaving any eyebrows, no balls and chains, no gaffer-taping VB (beer) cans to anyone and putting them out in the park. It’s a bit of wholesome fun with a bit of cheeky Australian humor,” bar manager Chris Vaughan said.
Bojangles has borrowed a red carpet from the Alice Springs council, which is normally reserved for the mayor.
“It’s a distinct possibility that he will come. Even if it’s for five minutes to drop in and say ’g’day’, let your hair down for five minutes, and have a quick glass of sherry or a cold beer,” Alice Springs Councilor Ernie Nicholls said.
“If protocol won’t allow that, they can just do a drive past. Think what that would do for Charlie’s image in the UK, because at the moment he’s on a roller-coaster ride downhill at a million miles an hour,” he said.
Royal-watchers are aghast at the increasingly farcical preparations for his wedding, with the venue for the civil ceremony switched to a local town hall and Charles’s mother Queen Elizabeth saying she will not attend.
Naked women jumping out of cakes?
Nicholls said the bachelor party organizers had received plenty of offers of entertainment for the event, including naked women jumping out of cakes.
“Women want to do all sorts of things for Charlie,” he said.
While in Alice Springs, where temperatures topped 100 Fahrenheit, Charles was due to visit the Royal Flying Doctors Service, an indigenous science and technology center, a desert park and an Aboriginal art exhibition.
Charles’s five-day visit to Australia, his first in a decade, will include stops in the cities of Melbourne, Sydney and the capital Canberra before he heads to New Zealand and Fiji.
After arriving in the western city of Perth, Charles visited the burns unit of a Perth hospital on Tuesday where he met victims of the October 2002 Bali nightclub bombings.
“The way all of you cared for the grievously injured from all over the world and supported, so generously, their families is humbling. All I can do on this occasion is salute you,” he said.
Earlier on Wednesday, Patrick Harrison, a spokesman for the prince, rejected a British newspaper report that Charles was planning a speech in which he would say he might not become king of Australia. “He’s not going to say that at all,” Harrison told Australian radio.
