Prince Harry and Meghan Make First Public Outing
Prince Harry and Meghan have made their first appearances since announcing they were expecting a baby, kicking off a high-profile Pacific trip yesterday with a photo in front of Sydney’s dazzling Opera House and posing with koalas.
The happy Prince and his US-born wife attended a welcome event at Sydney’s Admiralty, laughed as they received a pair of brown Australian-designed baby Ugg boots from the country’s governor general and posed for a picture. Meghan, dressed in a tight white Karen Gee dress, showed few signs of having a baby bump, but smiled broadly against the backdrop of the Opera House sails, which gleamed in the resplendent sunshine of a Sydney spring.
The pair are on a 16-day tour of Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga that had already been keenly watched but is now set to be a media frenzy that will test Australia’s large contingent of royal-sceptic republicans.
Shortly after the pair stepped off the long flight Down Under on Monday, Kensington Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth II’s 34-yearold grandson and the 37-year-old actress are “expecting a baby in the spring of 2019”, triggering a chorus of coos and rampant tabloid speculation about baby names.
As TV stations in the Englishspeaking world broke into their regular coverage, Google saw a spike in searches for “when is spring?” — the answer in Britain is from March until May or June — and newspapers played up an intercontinental rivalry over what the baby, who will become either an earl or lady, will be called.
The bookies’ instant pick was Diana — the name of the late princess who was mother to both Prince Harry and his older brother Prince William — along with Arthur and Alice.
The pair later visited Taronga Zoo, where they got up close with two koalas and their joeys and were then expected to take a boat trip across the harbour. They can expect a warm welcome on their tour, even if polls show half of Australians would like to ditch British monarchs as their country’s titular head of state.