Harry and Meghan are given a heartwarming reception as they visit a children’s hospital on the first stop of whirlwind four-day tour in Australia

A large crowd has gathered at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne for Harry and Meghan’s visit.

A group of about 70 staff, parents and young patients waited in the hospital foyer of in excited anticipation for the couple, who arrived at midday.

Many more watched on from higher levels and outside.

Harry and Meghan greeted staff at the hospital entrance, near where the plaque commemorating Queen Elizabeth II’s 2011 opening of the site is installed.

They warmly greeted children and posed for selfies as they wandered through the foyer.

Wearing a black sleeveless dress with gold buttons, Meghan chatted with parents and Harry shook the hand of a little boy, saying ‘give us a big smile!’

The couple appeared refreshed and cheerful, just hours after a 15-hour flight from Los Angeles.

As Harry and Meghan made their way through the hospital, he reached around his back with his left hand to hold hers.

Some parents were here coincidentally having their children treated when they heard about the VIP visitors.

Others were completely unaware.

‘I just came here and was like, what is going on?’ parent Pina Roberts earlier told Daily Mail.

‘Anything that acknowledges us (patients and parents at the hospital) is good thing.

‘But I didn’t even know they were coming, so I would wonder why they are actually here.’

A young girl has shared the selfie she scored with Meghan Markle at Royal Children’s Hospital.

Jasmine Seidl, 12, had spent the morning waiting for scans and appointments when she and her mother Louise heard about Harry and Meghan’s imminent visit.

‘We waited at the front, where we knew they were going to walk in,’ Ms Seidl told Daily Mail.

‘We were lucky enough that Meghan walked past and that she was very kind to stop and have a photo.’

She said that the encounter had lifted her daughter’s spirits, who had unable to go to school or play netball in recent weeks due to illness.

‘I think it’s something that she’ll remember for a very long time and look back on one day,’ Ms Seidl added.

‘It’s something something different, that’s for sure.’

‘It made us smile for a minute. We’re not getting many smiles at the moment, but we’ve got one this morning.’

Harry and Meghan’s first official stop on their Australia tour was Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, which has links to his late grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II.

The late Queen opened the previous hospital’s site in 1963, and returned with the Duke of Edinburgh in October 2011 to open the hospital at its current site.

A plaque at the hospital entrance commemorates the occasion.

Harry and Meghan’s four-day Australian visit is much more low-key than in 2018, when the then-newlyweds embarked on a 16-day tour of the Pacific (pictured below).

Seven years on, the couple have retained their titles but are no longer working members of the royal family.

The couple will use the privately-funded tour to visit groups that share their values or that they have long supported with a focus on mental health, community resilience and support for veterans and their families.

Harry and Meghan will visit Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital on Tuesday and later, the Australian National Veterans Arts Museum.

On Wednesday, Prince Harry will head to Whitten Oval, the headquarters of AFL club the Western Bulldogs, for a Movember event

He will then travel to Canberra to visit the Australian War Memorial, meet Indigenous veterans, attend an Invictus Australia reception and participate in the daily Last Post Ceremony

Harry will return to Melbourne to join Meghan for a guided cultural walk and visit a mental health charity, before he gives the keynote speech at the InterEdge Summit.

After arriving in Sydney, the Duke and Duchess are set to sail around the city’s famous harbour with Invictus Australia and attend the Super Rugby Pacific clash between NSW Waratahs and Moana Pasifika

Meghan is the special guest of a three-day luxury women’s retreat in Sydney, where tickets start from $2699.

The organiser of a ‘girls weekend’ retreat to be headlined by Meghan Markle said that the Duchess of Sussex is looking forward to ‘real woman-to-woman chats’ at the $2,699-a-head event.

Meghan will headline a women-only three-day retreat in Sydney organised by the Her Best Life podcast –  which is hosted by the Australian presenter Jackie ‘O’ Henderson and her manager Gemma O’Neill.

The event promises yoga, sound healing, meditation, a psychologist-led session, a disco evening and a ‘fireside chat’ Q&A with Meghan alongside a gala dinner which she will attend.

Guests are being charged around $2,699 for a standard ticket or up $3,199 for VIP premium packages offering more direct access to the Duchess.

Around 300 guests expected to attend the three-day event and the website states the ticket allocation has been ‘exhausted’. But there have been separate claims that not all tickets have been sold yet.

On Sunday, organiser Gemma O’Neill shared an update to her followers about her conversation with Meghan ahead of the retreat.

‘I’ve literally just got off the phone with Meghan… It couldn’t have been any more real and she was just so divine and so beautiful,’ she gushed.

As Harry and Meghan were ushered through a VIP entrance at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport and whisked away, security officers and minders escorted their luggage to a waiting vehicle to be transported to their luxury CBD hotel.

Photos showed a trolley laden with four suitcases, including one attached with a tag of the US flag.

Meghan and Harry have arrived at their hotel and are preparing for their first appearance of the day at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.

Meghan will later undertake a solo visit to a women’s shelter.

Tonight, the couple will meet with veterans and their families at Australian National Veterans’ Art Museum.

The taxpayer-funded bill for Harry and Meghan’s security during their four-day tour of Australia will likely reach six figures, according to a security expert.

‘I think it comes into the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands, because at the end of the day, it is a draw on the actual on each particular kind of state with regards to bringing the police in from normal kind of duties,’ Zero Risk security specialist Tony Loughran told Sunrise on Tuesday.

He added the Sussexes will need a high level of security.

‘He’s inevitably going to bring his team over,’ Loughran explained.

‘They’ll dovetail with private security here as well to make that connection. But then you’ve got the outer layer which is the actual police.

‘Then they’re going to come in and look at cordons. They’ll look at private venues themselves where they might need a bit of additional support. And it also is crowd control.

‘So there’s the inner core, which is the actual private security, the outer core, which is to do with intelligence, technology and so on and so forth.

‘And then the outer outer core, which is the police. So that will draw on the police resources to really to look at route corridors coming through vehicles, getting to hotels and venues and so on and so forth.

‘Even just getting off the plane and getting out of the airport, that type of thing comes at a cost.’

Victorian Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has blasted the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, amid speculation taxpayers will foot some of the bill for their Melbourne visit.

She called on the state government to intervene amid mounting calls for the couple to reimburse Victoria Police for any additional security provided.

‘Victoria Police are there to provide security and safety for Victorians,’ Wilson said.

‘They are funded by the taxpayer and we are standing here today talking about the fact that they are under-resourced.

‘So any suggestion that officers are going to be pulled off duty to provide security and protection for Harry and Meghan’s visit is absolutely unacceptable, and the government needs to rule out that this is occurring.’

Libertarian MP David Limbrick added: ‘If people want to spend thousands of dollars on former royals, that’s fine.’

‘But Victorian taxpayers should not be on the hook to provide the security of millionaires.’

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have touched down in Australia for a four-day tour of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were on Qantas flight QF94 from Los Angeles, which touched down at Melbourne’s Tullamarine Airport at 6.38am on Tuesday.

It’s understood they were in seats 3E and F, Sunrise reported.

The couple were met by a private convoy on the tarmac and escorted through a VIP exit before being whisked away to their hotel in the CBD.

‘It wasn’t until we got off the plane that we realised it was them,’ a US traveller on the same flight told The Age.

Another traveller described the couple as a beautiful people following a quick chat with them.

‘I said, ”I hope you have a lovely time in Melbourne and I’m sure you’ll enjoy Sydney,” she told reporters.

‘And we spoke about their children and that they were here for a couple of days.’

But not everyone was happy to see them.

‘I don’t like her (Meghan) at all,’ another traveller said.

‘Don’t come here. You don’t belong here in Australia. We don’t want them here.’