Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, touched down in Melbourne early on Tuesday on a commercial Qantas flight from Los Angeles, kicking off a four-day private visit to Australia — their first return to the country since a high-profile royal tour in 2018. The itinerary will take the couple through Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, combining appearances at charitable and community events with openly commercial engagements, in what some observers have labelled a "faux-royal" tour.
On the charitable side, the pair will visit patients and staff at a children's hospital, meet military veterans and their families, and attend events connected to family violence support services. Harry, who founded the Invictus Games — an international sporting competition for wounded and ill veterans — will visit the Australian War Memorial and attend an Invictus Australia event, as well as take part in the Anzac Day last post ceremony, a solemn national commemoration. Meghan will separately visit a women's homeless service. However, unlike their 2018 visit, when rapturous crowds greeted them across the country and they met then-prime minister Scott Morrison, there are no public walkabouts planned this time, with organisers citing security and disruption concerns.
The commercial dimension of the trip has attracted scrutiny. Harry is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the InterEdge Psychosocial Safety Summit in Melbourne, a professional development conference focused on workplace mental health, where tickets range from around A$498 for virtual attendance to A$2,400 for a premium in-person experience. Meghan will headline a three-day wellness retreat in a five-star Sydney beachside hotel — marketed as a "girls' weekend like no other" — where tickets cost up to A$3,199, with a VIP package including a group photo with the duchess. It remains unclear how much, if anything, the couple are being paid for either appearance. There is also commercial interest beyond the events themselves: Meghan's lifestyle brand, As Ever — which sells products including jams, spice kits and candles — registered trademarks across 12 product categories in Australia last year, suggesting the country may be a target market.
The visit has drawn mixed reactions. Royals researcher Giselle Bastin, an associate professor at Flinders University, noted that while the couple arrived in 2018 with considerable glamour as a newly married pair, much has changed. "There's been so much fracture and unhappiness around the couple and their relationship with the royals — the celebrity shine has rather worn off," she said, adding that selling A$3,000 wellness retreat tickets felt "tin-eared" in the current global climate. The couple have said the tour is privately funded, though police forces in Victoria and New South Wales have confirmed they will deploy resources to ensure public safety, leaving open the question of whether Australian taxpayers will bear part of the security costs.
The trip also arrives at a complicated moment for Harry personally: it is his first public appearance since it emerged that Sentebale, the African HIV/AIDS charity he co-founded, is suing him for defamation. Despite the controversy surrounding both the commercial nature of the visit and the broader narrative of the couple's estrangement from the British royal family, Harry and Meghan have framed the tour as privately organised and consistent with their ongoing advocacy work on mental health, veterans' welfare and gender-based violence.