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07-01-2024
Bureau Report + Agencies
SYDNEY/ MELBOURNE: When the world’s last reigning queen announced her abdication, history was also made in a country far, far away.
“I will hand over the throne to my son Crown Prince Frederik,” Queen Margrethe II of Denmark said.
Her decision to make way for “the next generation” of Danish royals has sent ripples around the world but it has also delivered the first Australian-born queen consort, Crown Prince Frederik’s wife, Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark.
Less than a month after Queen Margrethe II took over the throne in 1972 following the death of King Frederick IX, a girl called Mary Donaldson was born on the other side of the world in a small Hobart hospital.
The daughter of a mathematics professor and an executive assistant who had immigrated to Australia from Scotland, Mary grew up in a middle-class suburban home alongside her siblings, Jane, Patricia and John.
By most accounts she was a natural leader by the time she left high school – with her former principal telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), in 2003, that Mary was known as an “engaging, very outgoing, very amiable” young woman.
“She was a popular student and stood out from the crowd,” an old teacher, Geoff Lockhart, told the Sydney Morning Herald.
After graduating with a degree in law and commerce from the University of Tasmania, she had a high-flying career in advertising and then luxury real estate but it was a chance encounter in a rowdy Sydney watering hole during the 2000 Olympic Games that would ultimately turn her life upside down.
As the story goes, a 28-year-old Mary had gone to the Slip Inn pub to meet some friends for a drink.
Several Europeans were among the group including Frederik, his brother, Prince Joachim, his cousin Prince Nikolaos of Greece and Denmark, Princess Martha of Norway, and the now King of Spain, Felipe VI.
There were no security details or prying paparazzi, and the fact that Mary and her friends were among royalty didn’t come up in conversation.
Instead, the most serious topic of debate was whether men looked better with or without chest hair.
“Half an hour later someone came up to me and said, ‘Do you know who these people are?'” Mary told the Australian comedian Andrew Denton in 2005, remembering the encounter.
“I gave Frederik my telephone number and he rang me the next day, so you could say something clicked. It wasn’t fireworks in the sky or anything like that but there was a sense of excitement,” she added.
They quickly struck up a long-distance relationship and, by 2002, Mary decided to relocate to Denmark where she started learning Danish and accepted a job at Microsoft.
