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Britain's Queen wraps up Australia tour

Australia: Britain's Queen Elizabeth left Australia on Saturday at the end of a 16-day tour that impressed even the country's die-hard republicans.

The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, flew out of Perth airport aboard a scheduled Qantas jumbo jet at the start of a 21-hour flight to London.

Her final engagement in the country was to light the flame of remembrance at the war memorial in Perth's Kings Park.

Embarrassingly, the flame failed to ignite at the first attempt and an assistant had to do the honours.

Earlier the queen paid a visit to the CTEC medical centre, where she was shown surgeons working on a computerised training dummy called Sam, which is able to talk, blink, breathe and respond to drugs.

She was also shown how doctors can grow artificial spinal cord nerves in a project partly funded by paralysed former Superman actor Christopher Reeve.

Professor Teik Oh said the queen's visit would help the CTEC centre win support and cooperation from medical industries.

The queen was also shown Western Australia's Swan Bells project, where 18 bells recast from 600-year-old bells formerly in London's famous St Martin-in-the-Fields church will be rehung in a modern tower on the Perth waterfront.

Recast several times over the centuries, the original bells were rung to celebrate Sir Francis Drake's victory over the Spanish Armada and they pealed for the queen at her coronation nearly half a century ago.

When completed, the Perth belltower will become one of the largest musical instruments in the world.

The queen's tour of Australia, her first in eight years, has not drawn the huge crowds that welcomed her when she visited as a young monarch in 1954.

But she has been warmly welcomed, even by republicans, and the protests that some officials had feared have been so small as to be barely noticeable.

In the only security scares a man with a history of mental illness was arrested with a knife in Sydney and a tomato thrown from the crowd in Tasmania hit Prince Philip's hatbrim.

Australians voted in a referendum last November to retain the queen as their head of state, rejecting a proposal for a president.

The queen has made it clear that any future constitutional change is a matter for Australians and republicans have insisted they have no quarrel with the queen herself.

Opposition Labor leader Kim Beazley, speaking in Canberra during the tour, told the queen that if and when Australia became a republic "we will never forget your strong personal contribution as our head of state over nearly half a century".

The queen also went out of her way during the visit to acknowledge the plight of Australia's Aboriginal people in a way that went down well with representatives of that community.-Reuters