King Charles III departs Samoa, wrapping Pacific tour

King Charles delivers a speech during the opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Apia, Samoa – Copyright POOL/AFP Manaui FAULALO

Britain’s King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla departed Samoa Saturday, wrapping up a marathon 11-day tour that included a controversy-tinged stop in their Australian realm.

The 75-year-old king carried out more than 30 events on the scaled-back visit, his first major foreign trip since a cancer diagnosis earlier this year. 

The royal couple visited Sydney, Canberra and the Samoan capital Apia, where Charles attended a meeting of Commonwealth nations.

The 56-nation bloc — made up mostly of British ex-colonies — had hoped to focus on a future threatened by climate change, but instead bickered over a troubled past marked by slavery and colonisation.

At a rare night-time engagement Friday, the eve of his departure, Charles joked about his advancing years and the gruelling distance many delegates had travelled to reach this corner of the South Pacific.

“It will be interesting to see this evening who has the most success in battling jetlag,” he joked over dinner.

“I first visited, can you believe it, Samoa in 1974, as a young Naval Officer aboard a ship called HMS Jupiter” he recalled.

Returning 50 years later “just shows how unbelievably old I am” he joked.

The lasting images from the tour may come for a glitzy visit to Sydney’s famed Opera House and a naval fleet review on the sparkling harbour.

But the past was also in focus during Charles’ visit to Australia, where he was heckled by a lawmaker about the legacy of European settlement on Indigenous peoples.

“Give us our land back,” screamed independent senator Lidia Thorpe, who had earlier turned her back on the king as the dignitaries stood for the national anthem. 

“This is not your land, you are not my king,” she added, decrying what she said was a “genocide” of Indigenous Australians by European settlers.