For Charles’s first visit as king, Australians are royally unimpressed

But many state leaders are staying home. And perhaps the liveliest reception will be from members of Australia’s republican movement, who are selling sarcastic “Monarchy: The Farewell Oz Tour” T-shirts, as if the royals were an aging band on the brink of retirement.

“It’s very strange,” said Dennis Altman, a sociologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne who has studied the monarchy. “Here is a man who theoretically is our head of state coming to Australia two years after he came to the throne, but there is less interest and enthusiasm than I can remember for any previous royal tour.”

There are good reasons the king’s trip — his first to one of the 14 countries outside the United Kingdom where he is head of state — will be low-key.

Charles has an undisclosed type of cancer, which led Buckingham Palace to pare back his schedule to six days in Australia followed by five in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. This will be the first time he pauses his cancer treatment since his illness was revealed in February, according to British media reports.

But his visit also comes at a quiet time in Australia’s decades-long debate over whether to become a republic. Rarely has the issue seemed further from people’s minds since the failure of a constitutional referendum in 1999, when 54.9 percent voted against replacing the queen with an Australian president as head of state.

As a result, both avid monarchists and zealous republicans are hoping to use the trip to drum up enthusiasm, even though most Australians — more worried about the cost of living or the U.S. presidential election — may simply shrug.

“There is almost a complacency,” said Michelle Arrow, a historian at Macquarie University in Sydney. “It’s like, yeah, we’re a monarchy but it seems okay, we haven’t had any coups, we’re a pretty stable democracy.”

The crown may not crave complacency, but it might welcome it at this point. When Queen Elizabeth II died two years ago, there were fears that the coronation of her less popular son would cause Commonwealth realms to scrap him as head of state. That hasn’t happened.

Despite his cancer diagnosis, the king, 75, will feel a strong duty to visit the realms and take his seat as the head of the Commonwealth, an institution his mother sought to shore up as the British Empire collapsed, Altman said.

Charles also has personal history in Australia, where he spent six months in an outdoor school as a teenager in the 1960s.

“While I was here I had the Pommy bits bashed off me,” he said during one of his many return visits to Australia as Prince of Wales, using Australian slang for British immigrants.

Australia is also where he came with Diana, Princess of Wales, and a baby Prince William in 1983, a trip re-created in the Netflix series “The Crown.” “That was really the moment that the crown realized how popular Diana was,” Arrow said.

Charles’s own popularity took a hit when it was revealed that he knew in advance that the queen’s representative in Australia planned to sack the prime minister in 1975. The controversy, which showed the crown’s continued power over Australia, stirred republican sentiment.

Elizabeth’s personal popularity endured, however, and the republican movement foundered after the 1999 referendum, even though the leader of that movement — Malcolm Turnbull — later became prime minister.

The 2022 election of Anthony Albanese, another avowed republican, as prime minister has injected fresh momentum into the issue. He created a new position — assistant minister for the republic — and spoke of holding another referendum on Australia becoming a republic during a second term.

Albanese might not get a second term, however, as his party is struggling and has slipped behind the conservative coalition in recent polls. His government has also backed away from the idea of another referendum after its bid to constitutionally enshrine an Indigenous “Voice,” or advisory body, to Parliament failed last year.

“That was a partial reality check on the republic as well,” said Eric Abetz, a spokesman for the Australian Monarchist League and a conservative member of the Tasmanian state parliament. “The government had a bit of paint knocked off them.”

Albanese axed the position of assistant minister for the republic earlier this year.

Both Australian monarchists and their republican opponents claim to have the public’s support, but polls suggest the country is pretty evenly split. One survey from September 2023 — a year into Charles’s reign — found that 32 percent of Australians were against keeping the monarchy, up sharply from just before his mother’s death. But 35 percent of Australians favored keeping ties to the crown. Roughly one-fifth of Australians were undecided.

Despite the setbacks, the Australian Republic Movement believes public pressure could force another referendum, even if the monarchist opposition leader, Peter Dutton, becomes prime minister next year, ARM co-chair Nathan Hansford said.

While monarchists see the king’s visit as a rare opportunity to refresh Australians’ emotional attachment to the crown, republicans also see it as a chance to air their arguments.

“I think the question that Australians really should be asking is why should someone who is not an Australian be our head of state,” Hansford said.

The king himself has been careful to stay above the fray, with his office telling ARM that it’s a “matter for the Australian public to decide.”

But Altman, the sociologist, said Australia effectively already has become “a republic by stealth.”

“Something odd has happened, which is that constitutionally we are still bound to be a constitutional monarchy with Charles as our king, but in fact people have lost sight of that,” he said. “If anything, he is regarded as a slight curiosity.”

Charles and Queen Camilla are set to arrive in Sydney late Friday before heading to Canberra, where they will visit memorials and receive a ceremonial welcome at Parliament House on Monday. They will then travel back to Sydney to attend a community barbecue and other events Tuesday before reviewing naval vessels and greeting the public at the Opera House.

Hansford hopes the trip Down Under is Charles’s last as king of this country. “We would love for him to tour Australia plenty of times,” he said. But next time, “we’d love for an Australian head of state to welcome him.”