52 years on, Charles reunited with Oz sisters
TO the little girls who took him tadpoling and taught him how to duck dive, he was simply the Pom who ‘spoke funny’.
Whenever Prince Charles visited the sisters on their farm in Australia’s outback, they had to wear their Sunday best. And yesterday – 52 years on – they were dressed up again as they were reunited with their old pal.
Charles stayed at the family’s dairy farm during his time at college in Australia. The sisters presented him with an old black and white photograph showing them standing around him on the farm in 1966.
‘We have wonderful memories of your stay with us,’ said Penny Jenner, as she and her sisters – now known as Jane Tozer, Amanda Boxhall and Lisa Lawler – encircled him once again. In the old pictures, Charles – then 17 – was wearing an open-neck collar and a dark sweater as he stood with the little girls.
The prince could not help but giggle as Jane recalled his time at her father’s farm in Victoria while he was a student at Timbertop college. ‘You used to follow my dad around asking him questions and I remember you stirring the milk,’ she told him.
He was reminded that when he stayed at the farm Jane was ten, Amanda was six, Penny four and Lisa three. ‘I remember him coming tadpoling and swimming. It was me who taught him how to duck dive,’ said Jane. She admitted that in those days and at that age ‘we didn’t really think of him as royalty’. And they all agreed that they were too young to look up to him as a future king. ‘All I remember was thinking he spoke funny,’ said Lisa.
Yet they all knew their place. ‘We all had to get changed out of our farm clothes and put on our Sunday best when he came,’ said Lisa.
The meeting came at the Bundaberg Distillery in Queensland where Charles also did some rum-tasting. The trip is part of his seven-day visit to Australia to officially open the Commonwealth Games. He later flew to Lady Elliot Island, on the Great Barrier Reef, where he was told how the reef was being endangered by farmers on the mainland using chemicals that had been banned 25 years ago and which were being washed out into the sea.