CARDWELL, Australia (AFP) – Britain's Prince William toured northeast Australia Saturday, commiserating with locals during a low-key tour officials hope will boost spirits after a series of natural disasters.
Thousands turned out to glimpse the second-in-line to the British throne as he visited the Queensland towns of Cardwell and Tully, which were smashed by the ferocious winds and lashing rains of Cyclone Yasi last month.
"It's been a tough time, hasn't it?" he asked one resident after arriving to cheers and applause in tropical Cardwell.
Queensland has been hit by a series natural disasters this year, with devastating floods in January covering an area bigger than France and Germany combined and swamping the state capital Brisbane.
Dramatic flash floods swept away entire homes, bringing the death toll to more than 30, but within days Queensland was facing another disaster in Yasi.
Police senior sergeant Peter Williamson said William was "extremely upset" by the view over Tully, one of several towns the monster storm ripped through early last month, causing widespread damage but miraculously claiming no lives.
"He said the only positive was that there was no serious injury or loss of life," Williamson said.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said many people were still living in "desperate circumstances" because of the damage wrought by Yasi's powerful winds, which reached up to 300 kilometres (185 miles) an hour.
"At the end today they will go home again to pretty desperate circumstances and this visit won't change that," she told Sky News. "But it might just gladden their hearts and that's, I think, a helpful thing."
William will visit flood-hit Queensland towns on Sunday before travelling to communities in the southern state of Victoria also inundated by floods blamed on the weather pattern known as La Nina this year.
The 28-year-old prince arrived in Australia following an emotionally charged two-day visit to New Zealand in which he paid tribute to more than 200 people killed in recent earthquake and coal mine tragedies.
On Friday, Prince William walked among the rubble of Christchurch, almost a month after an earthquake devastated the city on February 22, before attending a memorial service for the estimated 182 people killed.
The previous day he visited Greymouth, on the South Island's West Coast, and met the families of 29 miners killed late last year when a gas explosion tore through the Pike River colliery.
"I think what we've seen in New Zealand is a prince with a very human touch and a lot of compassion and you can't have too much of that in Cardwell and Tully at the moment," Bligh said.
Bligh said many Queensland communities were still recovering, but their grief was nothing on the scale of the disaster in Christchurch or the 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami that hit Japan.
"But for a little town, when you lose a number of people then everybody feels it," she said.
One woman cheered by the prince was 102-year-old Betty Evans who spent several minutes with William after she showed him a card sent to her on her 100th birthday by William's grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.
"She has always been a big fan of the royal family, so she was very happy to meet him," her therapist Marina Hoare told Australian news agency AAP.
"The moment I told her that Prince William was visiting she said: 'Great, what am I wearing?'"
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