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Royals in Australia: A future European queen is moving to Australia to study, but she’s not the first to do so | Explainer
In August, Australia will become home to Norway’s future queen Princess Ingrid Alexandra when she begins a three-year degree at the University of Sydney.
The second-in-line to the throne is one of many young royals choosing to study abroad, including Belgium’s future queen Princess Elisabeth, who is currently caught up US President Donald Trump’s ban on foreign students at Harvard.
The ban will affect thousands of students from around the world and could see other senior royals look elsewhere to further their higher education, with Australia likely to become a popular choice.
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Other royals who have left their home countries to pursue a degree overseas in recent years include Spain’s heir Princess Leonor and her sister Infanta Sofia, who both graduated from the UWC Atlantic College in Wales.
Heir to the Dutch throne, Princess Catharina-Amalia, moved to Spain to study at the University of Amsterdam remotely when threats to her safety emerged in 2023-2024.
Her younger sister Princess Alexia is currently a student at University College London.
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It’s unclear why Princess Ingrid Alexandra chose Australia but her mother, Crown Princess Mette-Marit, spent six months at Wangaratta High School in 1992.
Ingrid Alexandra’s time in Australia will no doubt bring huge attend to Sydney University and likely inspire other young royals to head Down Under.
And they’ll be following in the footsteps of others over the years who have chosen to study, or take gap years, in Australia.
Count Nikolai of Monpezat
The announcement by Norway’s royal house on Monday came nearly two years after another Scandinavian royal, Count Nikolai of Monpezat, moved to Sydney.
Nikolai, who is best known in Australia as the nephew of Denmark’s Queen Mary, enjoyed his time here so much that he now splits his time in Sydney and Copenhagen.
But his love affair with Australia began in late August, 2023, when he enrolled at the University of Technology in Ultimo, to complete a semester on exchange from his masters in business economics course at the Copenhagen Business School.
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In an exclusive sit-down interview with 9honey within weeks of his arrival in Sydney, Count Nikolai said he had received advice from Queen Mary about what to do in Australia.
“I wouldn’t say she influenced me [when choosing Australia], but once I told her she was very happy for me, definitely. Gave me all the good recommendations, introduced me to her friends, family here,” he said.
“She wrote me a short itinerary of what to do and what to see, Palm Beach she recommended.”
In June, 2024, Nikolai returned to Denmark to graduate. He and girlfriend Benedikte Thoustrup, who previously lived in Australia on exchange in Alice Springs and in Armidale, have since been back and forth to Australia for work and to holiday.
Count Nikolai’s father is Prince Joachim, the younger brother of King Frederik X.
In the 1980s, Prince Joachim moved to Australia as part of his gap year after university and worked on a sheep farm in Wagga Wagga, in the New South Wales Riverina.
“He’s told me plenty of stories about it, it’s fun to listen when he reminisces about his time in Australia,” Nikolai said.
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Living in Australia for six months on the farm changed his outlook on life, Prince Joachim later said.
“That whole process of jumping out of your protected shell is important, whether it is during your academic studies or collecting work experience, it opens your mind and broadens your horizon, physically and also in spiritual terms,” Prince Joachim said in 2013.
“You have to let go of a lot of things that you thought were given. You have to adapt to a new environment, and once you return to your home, you will benefit from these experiences.”
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King Charles
Arguably Australia’s most famous exchange student is King Charles, who was sent to rural Victoria in 1966 after his years at Gordonstoun in Scotland.
The then-Prince Charles, who was 17 at the time, later described his two terms at Timbertop as “by far the best part” of his education.
The campus, part of Geelong Grammar School, kept the future king away from prying eyes and saw him take part in gruelling expeditions in blistering heat, walking 113 kilometres in three days and spending nights camping in a sleeping bag in the Victorian Alps.
His friend at the school Stuart McGregor told the BBC: ”Suddenly he was transported to a very different world”.
“It started out as almost bemusement, to some extent: ‘What is going on? Why am I here?'”
But, he said, that “quickly resolved itself and he started to embrace the concept”.
On a return visit years later, King Charles said of his time at Timbertop: “While I was here I had the Pommy bits bashed off me”.
He described the long hikes while wearing “a blood-stained shirt” as “hell”, but said he looked back with great affection on his stay, saying “it was good for the character”.
Speaking in Canberra during the royal tour last October the King said: “My own first visit [to Australia] came in 1966…when I had indeed the life-shaping and life-affirming opportunity to continue part of my education in Victoria”.
“Ladies and gentlemen, what an education it was,” he said.
“I had thought that the school I had been attending in Scotland was remote and testing enough, but nothing had quite prepared me for the realities of the bush country around Mount Buller.
“All I can say is I arrived as an adolescent and left as a more rounded, if not even somewhat chiselled character once I had contended with brown snakes, leeches, funnel-web spiders and bull ants.
“And, bearing in mind this was very nearly 60 years ago, being given certain unmentionable parts of a bull calf to eat from a branding farm in outback Queensland.”
Prince Harry
Decades later, Charles’ youngest son Prince Harry was sent to outback Queensland as part of his gap year in between leaving Eton College and joining the British Army.
He was due to spent six months at the Tooloombilla Station in southern central Queensland, a 16,000-hectare cattle property.
The station was owned by Annie and Noel Hill, who were friends of his late mother, Diana, while Hill’s father was a successful polo player who once coached Charles.
Prince Harry wrote about his stay in his 2023 memoir, Spare.
”My family believed hard labour is the answer to everything,” Harry said.
“This wasn’t merely work. Being a jackaroo required stamina, but it also demanded a certain artistry.
“You had to be a whisperer to animals. You had to be a reader of the skies, and the land. You also had to possess a superior level of horsemanship.”
The prince, who was 19, said he was treated as part of the family had to do his bit by completing daily chores.
“At first light we’d saddle up, gallop to the edges of the forty thousand acres (double the size of Balmoral) and begin to muster,” he said.
“That is, move the herd of cattle from here to there. We’d also search for individual cows that had strayed overnight, and drive them back into the herd.
“Or load some onto a trailer and take them to another section. I rarely knew exactly why we were moving these cows but I got the bottom line: cows need their space. I felt them.”
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In Spare, Harry described his time on the station as “nine of the best weeks of my life”.
But his stay was cut short due to press intrusion.
He spoke about the toll this took on him in a 55-page witness statement read in court during a phone hacking case against the Mirror Group Newspapers, in 2024.
“The situation in Australia was awful for me and there was supposed to be an agreement that once I had done the press call on arrival, I would be left to get on with my gap year in private,” Harry said.
“I was a teenager, and this made it clear that there was nowhere in the world, not even the Australian outback, where I wouldn’t be hounded by the press or paparazzi.”
Princess Diana and Zara Tindall
Prince Harry’s cousin Zara Tindall also spent part of her gap year in Australia and met her now-husband, former England rugby captain Mike Tindall, at a bar in Manly in 2003.
Diana, Princess of Wales, also spent time in Australia before she became the world’s most famous woman.
For three weeks in the summer of 1981, Diana lived at a beach house in Mollymook, on the NSW South Coast, with her mother Frances, relishing her final months in relative anonymity.
After Diana’s return to England, she and Prince Charles announced their engagement on February 24, 1981.
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