Meghan Markle made heads turn when she walked into an awards ceremony in Sydney wearing an exquisite cocktail dress, hours after the Duke and Duchess of Sussex had a flight scare after the royal couple's plane aborted its landing moments before touching down.
Meghan, on reaching Australia, changed into a beautiful £10,000 Oscar de la Renta designer gown to attend the Australian Geographic Society gala awards at the Shanghai-La hotel with husband Prince Harry in tow.
Both Harry and Meghan, who got to present awards at the ceremony, attended the glittery and glamorous event after their Qantas charter flight from Tonga, a Boeing 737, pulled up from the runway at Sydney Airport merely seconds before touching down.
The plane's pilot, Nigel Rosser, later explained that another plane on the runway had been "slow to roll" due to which the two aircraft were positioned too close and a decision was made to "abort the landing".
When the couple left the ballroom after the event, a pregnant Meghan was seen clutching a toy wombat, a small long-tailed marsupial from Western Australia, which was gifted to her for her unborn baby. In fact, Prince William was nicknamed 'wombat' by his mother Princess Diana when he was a kid.
At the award ceremony, the Australian Geographic Society honored the Queen with a special award for conservation for her initiative to highlight the plight of the world's forests. To its effect, Harry gave a very passionate speech after picking up the award, and said, "We cannot continue to pollute the oceans with plastics and other wastes. We cannot continue to breathe polluted air while cutting down our forests or without reducing emissions. We cannot stand by and let our wildlife disappear from the earth and our fish from the seas. I think we can agree tonight that there cannot be any more excuses."
"Thanks to the tireless efforts of everyone in this room and the environmentalists and conservationists of the past, we are ready to translate our awareness into action. It is going to take every single one of us to stop the clock on the destruction of our planet, and time is not on our side," he said. "The standard we walk past is the standard we accept. It's time to take personal responsibility and realize what a privilege it is for us to live alongside nature. Thank you for your dedication to our environment, our planet, our future, our Mother Nature."
