Denmark’s next queen is a progressive, ordinary former Australian

It was a classic Australian love story, set in a Sydney pub: girl meets boy. Girl marries boy. Girl lives happily ever after.

But when Mary Donaldson, then a 28-year-old from Tasmania working in the property industry, met ‘Fred’ – also known as Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark – at the Slip Inn in September 2000, she was suddenly thrust into a very different life . fairy tale.

“The first time we met or shook hands, I didn’t know he was the Crown Prince of Denmark,” said Mary in a 2003 interview. “Maybe half an hour later someone came up to me and said, ‘Do you know who these people are?’”

This month, more than 23 years later, Mary – now Crown Princess Mary, aged 51 – will become the next queen of Denmark, after Queen Margrethe II announced her abdication in her New Year’s speech. Maria’s husband becomes King Frederick X.

She is internationally acclaimed among royal watchers for her signature sense of personal style and her outspoken commitment to progressive causes, including advocating climate change and sustainability, as well as the rights of women and children.

She is worshiped in Denmark. And in her native Australia, the unlikely story of their Tasmanian princess has generated frothy headlines and extensive coverage of their own member of the Danish royal family and her much-vaunted wardrobe for decades.

In fact, Mary long ago renounced her Australian (and British, through her Scottish parents) citizenship. She retains only the barest trace of her original accent and speaks fluent Danish. But in Australia she is celebrated as a homegrown treasure.

“Princess Mary is a wonderful ambassador for Tasmania,” Jeremy Rockliff, the Prime Minister of Tasmania, said in a recent statement. He added: “We are so proud.”

Her impending accession to the throne has only increased that interest and pride: a recent headline on the front page of The Australian, a national broadsheet newspaper, read: “All Hail Mary, our flannie queen is living a fairytale dream.” (“Flannie” is Australian slang for the casual flannel shirts, often worn on farms and workplaces, that Mary favored as a youngster.)

The attempt by the British press to rename her ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’, citing her Scottish roots, has provoked scathing commentary in Australia. “Not satisfied with their own royal family,” said The Melbourne Age newspaper said this week“British newspapers are trying to claim Denmark’s next queen, Crown Princess Mary, as one of their own.”

King Charles III, the British head of state, is also the Australian monarch, so the British Royal Family is technically Australian. But most Australians feel ambivalent about this at best, with only 35 percent of Australians committed to retaining a British monarch in the long term. according to a recent poll.

But towards Mary, who is seen as relatable and down-to-earth, that republican tendency does not apply. “Mary’s ruthless rejection of drama, her enthusiastic commitment to charities in the public interest and her truly rare advocacy for the LGBTQ+ community in Denmark and beyond” appeal to even staunch anti-monarchists, according to Australian commentator Van Badham wrote in a recent Guardian column.

And then there’s the unlikely backstory. When Mary and Frederik met, Frederik was visiting Sydney for the Olympic Games. One of the people with him asked an Australian friend to go to the pub with him. The friend brought her sister, who brought her own friend who brought his roommate Mary.

“From the very first moment we started talking,” Mary said of Frederik in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia in 2003, “we never really stopped talking.” She gave him her number, the story goes, and he called her the next day. A secret, then not-so-secret, relationship followed, culminating in their marriage in 2004.

The daughter of a math professor and an executive assistant, Mary was born in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, Australia’s southern island state. “I was a T-shirt and shorts girl who was known to go barefoot,” she told the Financial Times in a recent interview. She attended public school, rode horses, played sports and had an otherwise unremarkable upbringing, before studying law and commerce at university and moving to Melbourne and then Sydney to pursue a career in advertising.

“I don’t remember one day wishing I could be a princess,” she told reporters shortly after the couple got engaged in 2003. “I wanted to be a veterinarian.”

Among Danes, who applaud her dedication, professionalism and Danish language skills, Mary is extremely popular, with an approval rating of 85 percent that surpasses many other members of the royal family, according to a recent poll commissioned by Danish public radio station DR.

“She comes across as very professional as crown princess from day 1,” said Lars Hovbakke Sorensen, an expert on the Danish royal family. “This is something that the Danes attach great importance to: the fact that they can see that the royal family works a lot and is involved in the matters they are involved in.”

He added: “You could say she has been so popular that it has even been necessary to downplay her role a bit in recent years. So she would not risk overshadowing the Crown Prince, who is destined to become the reigning monarch at some point.”

Australians also love Mary’s good works. But for many, Ms Badham wrote in her column, part of her magic lay in the sheer improbability of an Australian monarch whose route to the throne began in a slightly unhealthy inner-city pub.

“It wasn’t God who put her there,” she wrote, “but a warm evening in Sydney… and the Slip Inn.”