As the head of a dynasty which owes its wealth and influence to military aggression, white supremacy and colonial exploitation, and also as the bloke who two-timed the second-most popular pommy sheila – after his mother – ever to have visited Australia, King Charles is understandably worried about the reception he may receive here. But our continuing republican rumblings must have put such a visit pretty high on the to-do list he finds in the Red Despatch Box that’s now put on his desk each morning beside his Duchy Originals muesli and responsibly sourced oat latte. And as he watches Camilla folding his Union Jack budgie-smugglers and ‘I’m also Constitutional Head of the Barmy Army’ tee-shirt into their matching Louis Vuittons in preparation for that trip, he should take heart from the fact that in some respects he has an advantage over all his predecessors, sainted mum included. For one thing he is the only British monarch to have become related to an Australian citizen prior to ascending to the throne. The arranged marriage system which for so long imposed goldfish bowl dimensions on the European royalty gene pool was abandoned in the 1960s after it was found to have caused the IQ of the average first-in-line to fall below that of chickens. Since then the powers behind those thrones have tended to settle for the next best thing; good breeding stock which won’t stand out in a balcony shot. It would be nice to think that it was nothing but love which got young Mary Donaldson her ‘wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen’ gig. But it was impossible to watch the Coronation without being reminded of her extraordinary physiological resemblance to the Princess of Wales. Now that no celebrity is ever more than two metres away from a digital camera, mugshots really matter, and even the best ghost writer can’t tell a story as compellingly as high-res video. Much as the Palace might have wished the Sussexes would voluntarily absent themselves altogether from the Coronation festivities, it couldn’t have denied them an invitation to the Abbey without ruffling feathers. But when Meghan declined to accompany Harry they really missed a trick in not lifting a 30-year moratorium to put James Hewitt in the seat beside him.

Another reason Charles can claim to be uniquely qualified to be Australia’s head of state is that he is the only British monarch to have experienced it as the penal colony which his great, great, great, great, great-grandfather sent Arthur Phillip half-way round the world to establish. Charles was only seventeen when he was deported to Australia. His crimes? To have wandered repeatedly into the peripheral vision of his mother and father, and to have failed repeatedly – thanks to the abovementioned inbreeding – to pass any exams at the expensive schools the British taxpayer sent him to. The gruelling physical punishment he was subjected to each day of the six months he spent at the Victorian juvenile correctional facility known as Timbertop might have crushed the spirit of most teenage boys. So it is testimony to the unhappiness of Charles’s childhood up to this point that he remembers his time there so fondly, and sees it as such a formative stage of his life. He has never said as much, but it is entirely possible that the first tree our new head of state ever hugged was a eucalypt.

When a British monarch visits any Commonwealth country it is customary for the host nation to mark the occasion by inviting him or her to initiate some worthy public project; to turn the first sod of a new bridge construction, for example, or to cut the ribbon across the door of a new university. And sometimes the project is so important that the royal visit is planned around it, as was the case when the Queen attended in 1988 the opening of Parliament House in Canberra. I cannot say if Charles’s reign will last long enough for him to open our next Parliament House, but I do know where it will be located. In order for the leaders of our main political parties to maintain their policy positions on big-ticket issues like climate change, vaccination, gender and race relations it will be necessary for them to continue to ignore all the data which ordinary Australians find so distracting. Only Fraser Island, it seems, has enough sand for the burying of so many heads so deeply. In the meantime, I don’t think Charles need fear that his visit will affect most Australians’ much one way or the other, the only poetry it is likely to inspire in most of us being, ‘I did but see him on the news, and now I think I’ll have a snooze.’