Obamas seen together for the first time in five months as they arrive in Sydney on private jet 

Former US President Barack Obama was seen touching down in a private jet in Sydney for a scheduled speaking tour – taking wife Michelle along for the long ride for a rare public appearance.

The Obamas’ excursion Down Under comes days before Barack is set to speak at the city’s ‘An Evening with President Obama’ – where Australians are spending $195 to hear about the politician’s ‘path to success’, despite recent revelations aired by Michelle about their embattled marriage.

The event will be held in the Emerald City Tuesday, with another slated for the next day in Melbourne. The pair looked casual as they disembarked, with Michelle wearing a cardigan and jeans, and Barack sporting a beige blazer. 

The duo was accompanied by a force of security upon their arrival, and received a personal police escort while exiting the airfield at Sydney Airport and being carted away.

Apart from some high-profile individual appearances in the media –  such as Barack being photographed on Ashton Kutcher’s own private plane in LA Thursday – the outing served as one of the first times the couple have been spotted together in public in almost half a year. 

Known to frequently fly private after forfeiting their rights to Air Force One in 2016, the pair were previously seen together casting ballots in October in Chicago, and during the formal unveiling of their official White House portraits in September.

The couple has since stayed relevant thanks to a recent a spate of interviews given by Michelle, 59, to the media – one of which saw the ex-first lady admit she ‘couldn’t stand’ her husband for nearly ten years starting soon after Barack’s first term.

Speaking to news station Revolt TV last December while peddling her new book, Michelle revealed the extent of that hatred – and how it boiled over while the couple’s kids, Malia, 24, and Sasha, 21, were growing up.

‘People think I’m being catty by saying this – it’s like, there were 10 years where I couldn’t stand my husband,’ she told a round-table forum of the phenomenon, which surfaced when the kids were around 10 and 7, respectively.  

‘For 10 years while we’re trying to build our careers and, you know, worrying about school and who’s doing what and what, I was like, ‘Ugh, this isn’t even,” she said of the strains she felt at the time on her now three-decade marriage.

‘Ten years – we’ve been married 30,’ she recalled, speaking to a panel that included Destiny Child star Kelly Rowland and Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles-Lawson.

‘I would take 10 bad years over 30 – it’s just how you look at it,’ she said of how she and her husband eventually circumvented their marriage woes with time, while seemingly decrying other couples with less patience.

‘And people give up … [saying], ‘Five years – I can’t take it,” she said.

The interview was one of many in recent months meant to promote Michelle’s new book The Light We Carry, which revealed many of the previously unknown difficulties of the pair’s marriage, and ‘how hard it is even when you are madly in love with the person, even when everything works out right’.

‘You can establish systems and routines, anoint your various sleep, feeding and disciplinary gurus from the staggering variety that exist,’ Obama wrote in one excerpt of the book, which is already a New York Times and USA Today bestseller.

‘You can write your family bylaws and declare your religion and your philosophy out loud, but, at some point, sooner rather than later, you will almost surely be brought to your knees, realizing that despite your best and most earnest efforts, you are only marginally – and sometimes very marginally – in control.’ 

Another portion of the book adds that ‘dreaming, preparing and planning for family life to go perfectly … in the end, you’re pretty much just left to deal with whatever happens’.  

Since the book’s publication late last year, the pair had yet to be seen in public together – until now.

That said, in that span, Michelle has continued to offer insight into the couple’s personal life through a new podcast created this month, where she revealed that she is now trying to be less ‘critical’ of her two daughters now that they are more than seven years’ removed from the White House.

‘I’m on the other side of parenting. I’m moving from mom-in-chief to advisor-in-chief,’ she told anchor Hoda Kotb during another interview where her husband was not present.

‘That’s a lovely thing – to be able to watch my girls fly and have the relief that “OK, I think I didn’t mess them up.”‘

The 59-year-old explained that she’s now focused on not using a ‘critical eye’ with her daughters.

‘Our kids just want our gladness. They don’t need us to fix them,’ she added. 

‘They don’t need us to point out the thing that’s wrong, first.’

She added that it was ‘hard on my daughters growing up in the spotlight,’ but that she didn’t want to seem ‘ungrateful.’

Since then, Michelle had conducted interviews with show business personalities –  including Tyler Perry, Conan O’Brien, Gayle King, Hoda Kotb and David Letterman – while her husband has been seen schmoozing recently with various celebrity friends, including the recent one in LA, where both Sasha and Malia live.

It is not clear where in the US the pair had been traveling from upon their arrival in Australia, but if they had departed from the West Coast, the trip would have taken at least 12 hours.

If traveling over the Atlantic – such from the couple’s home in Chicago – the trip would have taken even longer, at at least 17 hours.

That said, despite being one of the fiercest opponents of climate change in US presidential history, Barack has a slew of jet-setting celebrity friends, and has been seen using Steven Spielberg’s jet several times in the past. 

The pair of excursions came just days after Dana J. Hyde, an alumnus of The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the US – better known as the 9/11 Commission  – died on a private jet owned by her husband’s company.

Hyde was a former Obama and Biden staffer, and served the former president’s administration for his entire two terms. The Obamas did not publicly comment on her death, which came after the Bombardier jet’s controls malfunctioned.