Why Mary has been the perfect princess and ambassador for Australia
Soon-to-be Queen of Denmark, Mary has been a perfect princess ever since she came to public attention – and a brilliant ambassador for Australia, too.
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Something is rocking in the state of Denmark. The small and peaceful Nordic nation, population not quite six million, is febrile with anticipation as Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary prepare to ascend to the throne.
This is a big deal for the Danes, indisputably. But they’ve crowned queens before.
For Australia, this is really quite new.
We’ve produced globe-conquering women, many times over – athletic champions like Dawn Fraser and Cathy Freeman, world-changing firebrands like Germaine Greer, and top-tier talents like Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman. We’ve minted a supermodel in Elle McPherson and a Nobel prize winner in Elizabeth Blackburn.
But we’ve never shipped anyone quite like the former Mary Donaldson of Hobart.
We’re not a country that produces queens of ruling monarchies. Not the sort who wear crowns and live in palaces, at any rate.
Something about the egalitarian streak in our DNA has worked against it.
But from the get-go, November 2001, when those first reports emerged that the Prince of Denmark was dating an Aussie girl, the universal response from Australians seems to have been “Good luck to her”.
And when we learned more about Mary, her background and the circumstances in which she met her prince, the more we liked.
It helped that she was not a private schoolgirl from Toorak or Turramurra. She was the public-school-educated, office-working, flannie-wearing, Powderfinger-listening good sort from South Hobart. The fact she was from Tassie gave her the kind of underdog status Aussies can’t help but back.
Sydneysiders took particular pride in how Mary and Fred met, over drinks at the Slip Inn during the Olympics. Their relationship seemed to further cement the status of the “best ever” Games, in a funny sort of way. It’s like: of course an Aussie girl won the heart of a prince at the Sydney 2000 Olympics; they really were that good.
Anybody who was in any doubt about Australia’s affection for Mary would surely have been convinced by the uproar that ensued last week when the Brits tried to claim her as a Scot, because of her parents’ heritage. This was out of line; nothing more than a calculated national affront. It was rightly dismissed as an outrage.
Maybe the Brits are just jealous. While some of their own princesses have occasionally flailed in their roles, Mary has been a paragon.
The Danes were won over from the outset, her quick (and apparently accent-free) mastery of the language impressing everybody.
“We love her here,” Danish royal expert and historian Lars Hovbakke Sørensen said.
“She is seen as warm and down to earth and she learned the local language to endear herself to the Danes. She’s a solid rock for the family.”
With regard to that baseline requirement for modern royals – looking good in clothes – Mary has smashed it, regularly appearing in Vanity Fair’s annual “best dressed” list.
She’s also perfected that other marker of successful modern monarchy: neither explaining or complaining about her lot.
When Queen Margrethe’s husband Henri made disparaging public comments about his wife during the latter stages of his battle with dementia, Mary remained discreetly silent; and when animal rights activists criticised her in 2019 after she was photographed with slaughtered deer on the lawns of Fredensborg Palace (the hunt being a royal tradition), she gave them the same treatment.
More recently, when a gossip magazine alleged Prince Frederik had had an affair with a Mexican socialite, Mary maintained a dignified silence. No “speaking her truth”, social media meltdowns or Oprah tell-alls for this queen-in-waiting.
Mary mastered those regal qualities of poise and elegant deportment without appearing icy or robotic early on, thanks in part to a course she undertook when the relationship was in its infancy.
And she’s known the right times to swap the pomp for playfulness, like the time she gave a speech at Frederik’s 50th birthday party, gently chiding him for laughing at his own jokes, and being a dedicated MAMIL – a middle-aged man in Lycra.
“Opinions vary over whether Lycra and men in their 40s go together. But darling, you still look rather sharp in Lycra,” she said.
Mary has been known to strike a fine silhouette in activewear herself, let it be (briefly) noted, and her active lifestyle – including jogging, cycling and more recently dressage – has been a source of inspiration to many.
She’s won plaudits for her parenting style, too. Low-key shopping trips in Copenhagen and holidays Down Under have given her four kids (heir to the throne Christian, 18; Isabella, 16; and twins Vincent and Josephine, 13) a good taste of real life, as well as royal life.
While Mary is firmly a Dane these days, she’s never forgotten Australia, and during the course of her regular visits she’s helped forge some enduring links as part of trade delegations.
Ulrik Dahl, Denmark’s Consul-General and Trade Commissioner to Australia, said the Crown Princess was an incredible asset, for her “winning personality,” her understanding of complex business issues, and her ability to attract media attention. When she took a bike ride through Sydney with the city’s lord mayor Clover Moore in 2023, “it was unbelievable how much press we got,” he said.
A trade delegation that followed the Crown Prince and Princess to Australia in 2013 when they helped celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House had been a huge success for Danish companies, Mr Dahl said.
“That [2013] delegation gave a lot of new business contacts both ways. Danish companies won big projects after being introduced there,” he said.
One example is the Danish architecture firm 3XM, which recently “upcycled” Sydney’s old AMP Centre into the award-winning Quay Quarter Tower, and is planning to similarly transform the city’s fish markets.
In return, Australia’s wine industry has made big inroads into the Danish market, Mr Dahl said, with Danes now drinking more Australian wine than any other nation in the EU.
The closer ties between the two countries were formalised in July last year, with the signing of the Australia-Denmark Strategic Partnership Arrangement.
While Princess Mary’s profile has helped Danes get a foothold Down Under, she’s also brought little bits of Australia back to Denmark.
She’s credited with indirectly helping form a Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2005, while the Crown Princess Mary Scholarship has been awarded to a number of Australians studying at ANU and UNSW.
Together with Crown Prince Frederik, she also helped bring Sydney’s much-loved Sculptures by the Sea exhibition to Denmark.
Event founder David Handley said the display of artworks along the Bondi clifftops formed the backdrop for one of the couple’s first dates, immediately after the Olympics.
“Crown Prince Frederik went back and was telling various people that he really thought Sculpture by the Sea should come to Denmark,” Mr Handey said. “Nothing much came of it, but he kept speaking to people about it and I kept hearing about his interest. Then out of the blue I got an email from the director of the ARoS museum in Aarhus saying ‘We actually really like this idea, can we talk to you about it?’”
It all came together in 2009 when Aarhus staged the first of what would eventually be four Sculpture by the Sea events, including works by dozens of Australian artists.
While that event is now in hiatus, the link lives on in the form of a fund for Danish sculptors to exhibit in Australia, and the gifting of Danish artworks to Snowy Valley towns ravaged by the Black Summer bushfires.
“We’re approached every year by other cities in Denmark to do Sculpture by the Sea, so fingers crossed in future there will be another one,” Mr Handey said.
With an Australian queen on the throne, it would seem to be a likely bet.
Originally published as Why Mary has been the perfect princess and ambassador for Australia
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