Is the heir with receding hair starting to drive you as spare as he says he is?
Well, the put-upon prince is certainly entitled to have his day in the London courts explaining how many million pounds worth of hurt and humiliation the shock horror British tabloids have heaped upon him since he was just a little tacker trying to have a quiet gap year in Australia, but surely he goes too far when he nails Noosa as one of the culprits. I hope the royalists in our midst noted that in the reams of coverage of the High Court proceedings in which Prince Harry is suing the Mirror Group for, among other things, “suffocating” his enjoyment of the Australian holiday in 2003.
Referring to a story headlined “Beach Bum Harry”, Harry explained to the court that this was about a trip to Noosa, and it included a picture of him frolicking in the surf near a Sunshine Beach house he had been staying in following a visit to Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo.
He said in evidence: “I only learnt recently that the [late] Queen had asked one of her assistant private secretaries to fly out to Noosa and take a house down the road from where I was staying, without me knowing. She was concerned about the extent of the coverage of my trip and wanted someone I knew to be nearby, in case I needed support.”
Prince Harry also told the court that tracking him down in Noosa would have been like “trying to find a needle in a haystack”. A challenge indeed, but not mission impossible for an ace reporter with a flair for the theatrical.
Noosa Today can reveal exclusively here that when the Beach Bum Harry yarn broke around the world, the Sunshine Coast Daily knew instantly which member of its vast reporting staff to assign, and that one-time gumshoe Fourth Estater was none other than our current deputy mayor, Councillor Frank Wilkie.
In a 2018 reflection on the hunt for Harry for the same newspaper, Frank recalled: “After discussing a raft of excellent tips from our ‘deep throat’, first port of call that day was a Sunshine Beach home belonging to a prominent Australian business establishment family. [Not to give anything away, but think undergrarments.] With at least one knight and one dame in their lineage, how could they have possibly refused a request to shelter the young prince?
“We barely got within 50 metres of the front door before a rugger scrum of security types descended. They’d been scoping Harry’s haunt from a house on the high side of the quiet, beachside road. A van bristling with cameras was monitoring the street also. Harry apparently wasn’t taking visits from local hacks that day.”
Undeterred, Frank and the late, great photographer Geoff Pottsy Potter hatched a cunning plot.
As Frank recalled: “After filing the story of the day’s excitement, the photographer and I thought we might see Harry during an early morning swim out the front the following day. Not wanting to spook the spooks, I fronted at 6am dressed in beach fishing gear, rigged for tailor with a 14 foot beach rod, Alvey side-caster, six kilo line, gang-hooks and pilchards with tape recorder and camera in my fishing bag. I’d jagged a flathead and a few dart from a nice gutter right in front of Harry’s hideaway before our photographer rocked up in full work gear. The MI5 boys didn’t buy it. Cover blown, we left. Good breakfast though… I was shattered. Lovely to see Harry turn out to be such a fine young man.”
Mmm. When I called the deputy dawg for an update on his feelings about the spare royal, Frank still seemed more excited about snaring a couple of keepers in a gutter at Sunshine Beach than he was about the non-encounter with Harry. But he did say: “You have to feel some sympathy for him. I suppose it was a bit of a silly assignment, but I don’t regret anything about me newspaper reporting days in Noosa. I think I learnt a lot about my community.”
