It was a traditional Australian love story, set in a Sydney pub: Woman meets boy. Woman marries boy. Woman lives fortunately ever after.
However when Mary Donaldson, then a 28-year-old from Tasmania working in actual property, met “Fred” — also referred to as Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark — on the Slip Inn in September 2000, she was all of a sudden plunged into a wholly completely different fairy story.
“The primary time that we met or shook fingers, I didn’t know he was the crown prince of Denmark,” Mary stated in a 2003 interview. “It was maybe half an hour or so later that somebody got here as much as me and stated, ‘Are you aware who these individuals are?’”
This month, greater than 23 years later, Mary — now Crown Princess Mary, aged 51 — will change into Denmark’s subsequent queen, after Queen Margrethe II introduced her abdication in her New 12 months’s Day speech. Mary’s husband will change into King Frederik X.
She has change into internationally acclaimed amongst royal watchers for her distinctive sense of non-public type and her outspoken dedication to progressive causes, together with local weather change advocacy and sustainability, in addition to the rights of girls and youngsters.
In Denmark, she is adored. And in her native Australia, the unlikely story of their Tasmanian princess has for many years prompted frothy headlines and intensive protection of their homegrown member of the Danish royal household and her much-vaunted wardrobe.
In actual fact, Mary has lengthy since renounced her Australian (and British, through her Scottish dad and mom) citizenship. She retains solely the slightest hint of her authentic accent and speaks fluent Danish. However in Australia, she is well known as an area treasure.
“Princess Mary is an excellent ambassador for Tasmania,” Jeremy Rockliff, the premier of Tasmania, stated, in a latest assertion. He added: “We’re so proud.”
Her forthcoming accession to the throne has solely heightened that curiosity and delight: One latest headline on the entrance web page of The Australian, a nationwide broadsheet newspaper, learn: “All hail Mary, our flannie queen dwelling a fairytale dream.” (“Flannie” is Australian slang for the informal flannelette shirts, typically worn on farms and work websites, that Mary favored as a youthful particular person.)
The British press’s effort to recast her as “Mary, Queen of Scots,” citing her Scottish roots, has prompted scathing commentary in Australia. “Not content material with their very own royal household,” The Melbourne Age newspaper stated this week, “British newspapers try to assert Denmark’s subsequent queen, Crown Princess Mary, as certainly one of their very own.”
King Charles III, the British head of state, can also be the Australian monarch, so the British royal household is technically Australian. However most Australians really feel at finest ambivalent about this: Solely 35 p.c of Australians are dedicated to retaining a British monarch in the long run, in accordance with a latest ballot.
However towards Mary, who’s seen as relatable and down-to-earth, that republican bent doesn’t apply. “Mary’s relentless abjuration of drama, her enthusiastic dedication to causes within the public curiosity and her actually uncommon championing of the LGBTQ+ neighborhood in Denmark and past” attraction even to fervent anti-monarchists, the Australian commentator Van Badham wrote in a latest Guardian column.
After which there’s the unbelievable again story. When Mary and Frederik met, Frederik was visiting Sydney for the Olympic Video games. One of many individuals with him requested an Australian good friend to affix them on the pub. The good friend introduced her sister, who introduced her personal good friend who introduced his roommate, Mary.
“From the very first second that we began speaking,” Mary stated of Frederik in a 60 Minutes Australia interview in 2003, “we by no means actually stopped speaking.” She gave him her quantity, or so the story goes, and he rang her the following day. A secret, then not-so-secret, relationship adopted, culminating of their marriage in 2004.
The daughter of a arithmetic professor and an govt assistant, Mary was born in Hobart, the capital metropolis of Tasmania, Australia’s southern island state. “I used to be a T-shirt-and-shorts lady, identified to go barefoot,” she advised the Monetary Occasions in a latest interview. She attended public faculty, rode horses, performed sports activities and had an in any other case unremarkable upbringing, earlier than learning regulation and commerce in school and transferring to Melbourne after which Sydney to pursue a profession in promoting.
“I don’t recall wishing that sooner or later I’d be a princess,” she advised reporters shortly after the couple turned engaged in 2003. “I wished to be a veterinarian.”
Amongst Danes, who applaud her diligence, professionalism and Danish language expertise, Mary is enormously fashionable, with an 85 p.c approval ranking outstripping many different members of the royal household, in accordance with a latest ballot commissioned for Denmark’s public radio station, DR.
“She has appeared very skilled as a Crown Princess from Day 1,” stated Lars Hovbakke Sorensen, an skilled on the Danish royal household. “That is one thing that Danes place nice significance on — the truth that they will see the royal household works loads and engages within the issues they’re concerned in.“
He added: “One may say that she has been so fashionable that it has even been mandatory lately to downplay her function a bit. So she wouldn’t threat overshadowing the crown prince, who’s the one destined to be the reigning monarch in some unspecified time in the future.”
Australians additionally love Mary’s good works. However for a lot of, Ms. Badham wrote in her column, a part of her magic lay within the sheer unlikelihood of an Australian monarch whose path to the throne started at a faintly insalubrious inner-city pub.
“It was not God that put her there,” she wrote, “however a heat Sydney evening … and the Slip Inn.”
