According to opinion polls, more Australians want to ditch the country’s ties with the British monarchy than retain it.
The Labor government of prime minister Anthony Albanese includes an assistant minister for the republic. King Charles is being dropped from Australian banknotes. Most major Australian media outlets, including News Corp’s flagship newspaper the Australian, and especially the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, are no supporters of the King. The ABC last year notoriously used its coronation coverage to debate the future of the monarchy and to assert its direct responsibility for the greatest stain on Australia’s history: the suffering and maltreatment of Aborigines in the colonial period.
For Australian republicans, it seems that a monarchy suddenly is quite all right when one of our own can become a crowned head of Europe
This New Year’s Day, however, even the ABC are royalists. Why? Because the surprise announcement by Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II that she will abdicate in a fortnight’s time means there will be a new queen in Copenhagen. And the wife of the new king is Mary Donaldson, an Australian.
Born in Tasmania to parents who came to Australia from Scotland (enough for the Times to mischievously claim her as a Scot), Mary famously met crown prince Frederik in a Sydney pub, the Ship Inn, during the 2000 Olympic Games, not knowing who he was. Love bloomed, the pair had a fairytale wedding, have four children and, notwithstanding the strenuously denied allegations of Frederick straying last year while visiting Madrid, the rest is history.
From the start, Mary Donaldson’s marrying into Danish royalty has been closely followed by Australians, and she often visits her homeland in low-key trips to see family and friends. That Danes have so warmly embraced her is often seen by Australians as royal endorsement of their country. If anything, Mary’s public stoicism through the Madrid furore endeared her more to her former countrymen.
But that’s nothing compared to the sudden surge of interest Down Under now she will become queen of Denmark. Australian television and print media are, as we say here, ‘all over it like a rash’.
The republican-leaning ABC delighted in recounting the ‘love story’ between Mary and Frederik, even recycling old news reports of her engagement and quoting Mary’s former state school headteacher saying she was destined for something special. ‘The people who do remember working with Mary as teacher and student, they remember a person who was very engaging, very outgoing, very amiable, obviously a leader to be in the student council of that year’, the headteacher was quoted in ABC’s gushing retelling of Mary’s story.
Liberal party MP and former junior minister, Alex Hawke, got in on the act too. ‘Happy New Year everyone. 2024 is off to a great start with news an Australian will become Queen of Denmark’, he tweeted happily. He wasn’t the only politician jumping on to social media with similar thoughts.
The republican premier of her home state of Tasmania, Jeremy Rockliff, came out of his holidays to declare, ‘Princess Mary is a wonderful ambassador for Tasmania… I look forward to watching the next generation, and Tasmania’s own born Queen lead Denmark’s future.’
For those who support Australia’s current ties to the British crown, it’s bemusing to watch so many self-declared opponents of Australia’s inherited monarchy celebrate and laud Crown Princess Mary as she readies herself to be Denmark’s queen.
For Australian republicans, it seems that a monarchy suddenly is quite all right when one of our own can become a crowned head of Europe. That they are unashamedly celebrating Mary’s proven qualities of character and service, qualities that are – for all its institutional and human faults – also part and parcel of their own inherited monarchy, seems to be utterly lost on them. One can only savour the irony.
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