Long live the Prince!

We meet royalty

While many could claim to feel like the 'king' of their own castle (or modest semi-detached), it's not often that you meet a former farmer who actually owns his own country right in the middle of Australia. But we did.. Yes, even other sites will confirm it's true.

Almost 35 years ago, Prince Leonard Casley (as he is now known), after a wrangle with the Australian government over his wheat crop managed to outwit them and secede making his farmland an independant sovereign state. The Hutt River Province principality is about the size of Hong Kong but while 13,000 people worldwide have citizenship only about 30 of them actually live there. How do you become a citizen? Cough up $500. For that sum, the key to the kingdom is yours and you get an official passport as well.

Residents don't pay any taxes making the prospect of living there much more inviting, but with nothing around for hundreds of miles you'd have to either be a recluse, or work in the gift shop. Although you'd have to fight Princess Shirley (his wife) for the job.

The Prince and Princess have an eccentric life to say the least. Running your own country is a full-time occupation, I was told by a tired-looking Princess Shirley. Their sons have taken over the farming side of things while they concentrate on state visits, processing overseas citizenship, residency and knighthoods; appointing people to represent the Province worldwide, getting the website updated, running the government office and the post office. For a couple who must be reaching their eighties, it's a pretty mean feat.

The first warning that this was going to be a strange experience was coming up the long driveway and passing an imposing stone bust of Prince Leonard's head (complete with lazy eye). I was the first one out of the coach marching up to the elderly man, my hand outstretched. We Brits were going to make a good impression! And, it was we who felt like royalty when the great man himself treated our group to the grand tour. Into the government building we went to get our passports stamped and checked - when we get home I'll prove it!

Obviously just a ploy for the bemused tourists rather than for security purposes, he scanned all our passports then showed us the symbols on each of them that only showed up under UV lighting to prove they were legitimate. On mine and Jody's, welsh daffodils appeared on the pages and a sunrise lit up the background of Angkor Wat on our Cambodian visa.

The Prince gave a history of Hutt River and showed us the vast collections of currency, stamps, gems, paintings etc that they've amassed over the years. However, he spoke so fast and without pause for breath that it was clear that he'd made this speech a hundred times before. I think it gets faster every time. The entire speech was all-one-sentence-and-the-same-tone-of-voice that even us native English speakers had trouble following him. Of course this meant that the 80% of our group whose second language was English didn't understand a word and spent most of the time staring open-mouthed. At least, we all got our pictures taken standing in front of the flag once he'd donned his more regal attire, and got to raid the gift shop for Hutt River Province official stamps and money (so we'll never forget his face).

Where are we? About to head south through the red centre of Australia. It's our last day in Darwin today though all we've really seen here is the inside of shops and swimming pools as it's low season and nothing's open because of the sticky wet season heat. They must have all fled to cooler climes. We've just returned from an errand to buy sleeping bags for camping. See, we're proper travellers now!