Wild detail in Charles tour video

Sydney’s CBD is, usually, a sterile wasteland on Sunday mornings, a place where the human spirit goes to wither and die and skateboarders go to ollie on the Reserve Bank’s front steps.

But not this Sunday.

If you had been standing on one of the normally deserted streets of the bleak, lifeless business district, you would have been treated to an otherworldly sight – a 14-car official song and dance routine not including the six zipping, zooming police motorbike outriders with the imposing countenance of only the I-est of VVVVIPs. (Maybe a few more Vs in there for good measure’?)

It was a fantastical sight – the spectacle of monarchy playing out on our very own streets; the flummery and the rigmarole and the vast entourage of flunkeys, both foreign and domestic, all on full display.

However, there was one detail that tells a whole other story – about a sick man who was doggedly determined to pause his cancer treatment to fly 44 hours round-trip for a whistlestop visit, and all at “considerable risk”.

Watch the video and there in among creepily anonymous black vans and white SUVs you will see an ambulance, its lights flashing, trailing His Majesty’s multi-car flotilla of pomp and gun-toting specialist security.

What is Buckingham Palace so damn worried about to have included an ambulance in the line up?

When the King moves about the place, it is with a certain ring of protection, of course, but the inclusion of medical care appears to be new.

But contrast that Sydney scene with Charles in London where he makes his royal progress through the teeming city in his State Bentley sans apparent on-hand ambulance.

It’s not about being overseas either – the same went for Prince William’s motorcade in New York. No ambulance.

Of course, both King and future King have a fleet of Range Rovers and 4WDs trailing in their wakes, but no vehicle stocked with a defibrillator and all the aspirin a flagging sovereign might ever want to take.

There have been other concerning Charles moments on this tour.

On Sunday, the King delivered a speech at the NSW Legislative Assembly, with the passage of the years clearly on his mind as he talked about the “sands of time”. His Majesty then bailed on the lunch given in his honour, leaving after less than 10 minutes and even before the first course was served.

Meanwhile, journalists for news.com.au on the ground reported that the security and staffing around him were overwhelming and that they had “never been manhandled like that before” at any other event.

Then there are the doctors – yes, plural.

Every time the late Queen ventured off British soil to carry her own Colman’s Mustard and to wave the royal banner, she travelled with her own doctor and even, in a deliciously gruesome detail, a supply of her own blood. Standard work trip stuff.

But on this tour, Charles has two doctors with him. No details have been given about why this provision would seem to have been doubled or whether one of them is a specialist of any sort.

Writing in the Daily Mail, the well-connected historian and biographer AN Wilson argued this trip is one “he has made at considerable risk to his health”.

Ask yourself, what is the nearly 76-year-old really doing here?

With the King and Queen set to travel to Canberra today, and as much as Charles keeps banging on about his connection to our shores – we get it, the 17 visits, the two terms in the veritable wilds of Geelong Grammar’s Timber Tops, that one time he ended up in a toe-curlingly staged lip lock on Cottesloe Beach – there is no denying the fact that for more than 30 weeks, he has been treated for an unspecified form of cancer.

Why and wherefore, then? What is the purpose of “risking” his health for a largely ambivalent nation?

As a former courtier told the Daily Beast’s Tom Sykes last week, this tour is “all about proving he isn’t dying”.

There is also the fact that One must try to do One’s level best to keep Australia from pulling at our political leash and getting ideas above our station about independence and looking too long and hard at a system where a hereditary monarchy on the other side of the world rules over us.

I’m not sure if this game of pretend is worth it.

Their Majesties pitching up here have brought with them exactly the sort of long-trotted out and then carefully tidied away and wearisomely recycled conversations about our political future and that naughty R word that some people get all hot and bothered about – republicanism.

But if there was ever a moment, an image, a tableau that reframes that debate and asks the questions about our future identity as a nation, it’s watching that 14-car cavalcade take over the already empty streets.

Let the record show, I think Charles is marvellous.

His lifelong, unerring dedication to environmentalism and the climate crisis; his stance on Tibet and unswerving support of the Dalai Lama, his impeccably droll collection of ties. (Like the Hèrmes T Rex one he loves, with “rex” the Latin word for King).

But do we as Australians actually want or need the stewardship for a man long past retirement age who lives 17,000 kilometres away and who only visits us every handful of years under a certain degree of forbearance to be our head of state?

What real, meaningful connection does he have to us as a nation?

His Majesty is an incredible man and leader – but should he be our leader? At least now we can say that a King of Australia has actually visited Australia, but whether a second one ever swill, we will have to see.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles