Princess Diana famously brought Prince William on the family's 1983 royal tour of Australia and New Zealand (pictured above). Given that he was just a baby, William did not bring back any memories from the trip. However, he did bring back a nickname that has withstood the test of time, he told Matt Lauer in a 2007 interview with NBC News.
During the trip, Diana took William to see a wombat, a local animal, and she began to affectionally call her baby son that. "It kind of stuck with me. I can't get rid of it now... I've been rightfully told because I can't remember back that far. But when we went to Australia with our parents, and the wombat, you know, that's the local animal. So I just basically got called that. Not because I look like a wombat. Or maybe I do," William said.
William spent much of the six-week tour separated from his parents as they tended to their jam-packed agenda, as Elle noted. However, the trip did offer the family some unique opportunities to bond away from the spotlight. "The great joy was that we were totally alone together," Charles told a friend in a letter (via Vanity Fair), describing how he and Diana "laughed and laughed with sheer, hysterical pleasure" as they watched their son attempt to crawl "at high speed knocking everything off the tables and causing unbelievable destruction."
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