Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh made an extensive tour of Australia in 1970 in connection with the bicentenary of Captain James Cook sailing up the country’s east coast in 1770. However, it was not until 2009 that claims of a secret plot to kill the monarch and her husband during their royal tour came to light. Detective Superintendent Cliff McHardy, 81, decided to break his silence in an interview in his local newspaper, the Lithgow Mercury, to shed light on what he saw as one of the great unsolved mysteries of his long police career.

The late Mr McHardy said that on April 29, 1970, the Queen and Prince Philip were travelling by train to the farming town of Orange.

When the train was near the Blue Mountains town of Lithgow, two hours to the west of Sydney, it struck a large log wedged across the rails.

Mr McHardy insisted that it was an act of deliberate sabotage to derail the train and suggested the act could have killed the royal couple.

He told the publication that the “catastrophe” was only averted because the train driver was travelling slowly.

He said: “If the train had reached its normal speed it would have plunged off the tracks and into an embankment.

“My investigations showed that the log was deliberately placed on the tracks.”

Instead, the log reportedly got stuck underneath the front wheels.

According to his report, a security “sweeper” train checking the line an hour before the Queen’s arrival had found nothing, which led him to believe the culprits had knowledge of the official train’s schedule.

Mr McHardy said police investigating the incident were ordered to keep details quiet to avoid embarrassing Australia.

However, after he came forward almost 40 years later, in 2009, a spokesman for New South Wales Police said officials were looking into Mr McHardy’s story to determine its validity.

He explained: “They said keep it out of the press because the Queen is still out here and if it had broken the next morning there would have been all sorts of trouble and we can do without that in a small country town.”

He said that he had decided to speak out now in the hope that “it would prompt the people responsible to come forward and own up”.

At the time, Buckingham Palace denied all knowledge of the incident.

If Mr McHardy’s claims were valid, it would not be the first time a royal has been in a “near-miss”.

Similarly, Prince Charles was also a victim of an “assassination attempt” in Australia.

On Australia Day, 24 years ago, the heir to the throne was about to commence handing out awards at a ceremony in Sydney’s Darling Harbour, when a former anthropology student fired two shots and jumped on the stage simultaneously.

The celebration continued afterwards, and the unhurt Prince made no comment on the incident.

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