‘SHE LOVED AUSTRALIA’
After a secret trip to NSW, Diana forged a bond with the country
Following what would be her last visit to Australia, Princess Diana raved about the country to her teenage son William. “I remember my mother telling me what a profound impression this country had made on her,” said the prince during an Antipodes tour in 2010, “and how much she loved Australia.”
A recently divorced Diana made that 1996 trip for the opening of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, a publicity coup orchestrated by former nurse turned charity fund-raising queen Marie Sutton. “She and her PA would ring me up and talk about plans for the Victor Chang ball,” Sutton tells WHO. “She really wanted to visit [Sydney’s] St Vincent’s Sacred Heart Hospice once she heard about it. Once when they called from Kensington Palace, I could hear the boys playing in the background and her telling them to keep quiet and stop jumping around. She was totally natural, great fun, loved a joke.”
TV personality Molly Meldrum also forged a friendship with the princess, after both got involved in AIDS charity work. During a trip Diana and Charles made to Australia in 1985, Diana was returning from a function with Meldrum when they passed his home. “She said, ‘Let’s stop, I want to take a look,’” he tells WHO. “I told her, ‘No, no, you don’t.’ But she was determined. So I took her in and [the late 1960s pop star] Lynne Randell, my PA at the time, was in the kitchen. We walked in and I introduced her to Di. Lynne just looked up and said, ‘You’ve got to be f--king kidding.’ Di laughed and sat down on the couch. That’s when we really became friends.”
But perhaps Diana’s most intriguing visit to Australia was as a 19-year-old in 1981, when her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, whose husband, Peter Shand Kydd, owned a NSW farm, brought her to Australia, reportedly to “think more seriously” about Prince Charles’s February proposal. For three weeks Diana lived in a house in Mollymook, on the NSW South Coast, where local Margie Nyholm ran a fish and chip shop. “This very tall girl started coming in and she had a scarf around her hair and big glasses on,” recalls Nyholm, 72. “There was all this talk about Lady Diana [in the press] and it just twigged. Her mother usually ordered fish and chips. Diana would stand there and look at all the food and then just buy a little fruit-juice box. She’d talk to her mother and her mother said, ‘Darling you must keep your strength up.’ She was trying to encourage her to eat.”