AUSTRALIA: Contrasting royals have Australians all agog at the moment, Pádraig Collins reports from Sydney.
The Queen of Australia (aka Elizabeth, Queen of England) appears on the Australian $5 note and all the country's coins. So it is perhaps not surprising the current royal visit is causing quite a fuss here.
But it is Australian-born Princess Mary of Denmark (here with her husband Prince Frederik) and not Charles, the Prince of Wales - also here at the moment - who is gathering most of the column inches.
Woman's Day magazine's cover story this week trumpets "Fred tells: Why I love Mary so much". (Needless to say, Fred tells nothing of the sort; the two-page story features only a recycled nine-word quote from him.)
Australian Women's Weekly leads its offering with "World Exclusive: Mary, my life as a Princess". Who magazine has "Mary and Frederik: inside their private world". And, not to be outdone, New Idea rushed out a 100-page special edition on Princess Mary's visit, brimful of pictures of the princess in designer dresses and a series of spectacularly awful hats.
Both Charles and Mary are supporting local charities, unveiling things, planting trees, attending government functions, visiting hospitals and mixing with the occasional commoner. But in case you were not getting the idea as to who is Australia's royal du jour, Woman's Day helpfully follows its Mary and Fred story with one titled "Charles and Camilla's wedding in chaos".
So why is some minor Euro-royalty usurping the rightful air to the throne of Australia? Simple: Mary, neé Donaldson, is Tasmania born and bred. The last internationally known person to come from there was Errol Flynn - and Mary has been "in like Flynn" when it comes to instant fame.
However, she was either being disarmingly modest or disingenuous when she said on ABC television on Monday: "How can it not be that I can't be anonymous in Australia? There's a part of me that still maybe hopes, or thinks, that there isn't such a big interest, that we can't find ourselves somewhere that no one will [ know us]."
We are now obliged to refer to her as "Our Mary" (as we also must do with Our Nicole - as in Kidman - and Our Cate - as in Blanchett).
"Radiant, regal and ravishing - our Princess Mary glows with happiness," gushed Woman's Day.
The scene for the current right royal showdown was set after Mary's wedding last year to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, when a correspondent, who wanted shot of Australia's British heritage, wrote to the letters page of the Sydney Morning Herald asking: "If we must have a royal family, can't we have the Danes' rather than the Poms'?"
Even those with no interest in royalty - other than having it step aside for a Republic of Australia - cannot avoid finding out that Princess Mary is 12 kilo (two stone) lighter now than pre-marriage. She has also had "accent reduction" training to lose her Australian vernacular. It's obviously working quite well. After hugging a 7-year-old girl upon arrival at Sydney airport, Princess Mary said, in perfect Eurenglish, "It gives me a warm heart".
Against the glamorous Diana nouveau that Mary is becoming, the best the papers can do for Charles is to keep trotting out a 26-year-old picture of a bikini-clad girl stealing a kiss on a previous trip to Australia. It is also strongly rumoured that tomorrow Charles will tell the Australian people that he may never become their king due to the unpopularity of his impending marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles and a declining support for him as a future monarch.
Kim Wilson, editor of the Australian edition of OK! magazine, is having none of this, though. "Despite all the talk of an Australian republic, there's a surprising fascination with the royals," she told AFP news agency.
Sydney woman Kate McKenna confirmed this feeling to The Irish Times. "I'm an avowed republican but I find the whole thing very interesting. Every little girl has a dream of being a princess. The idea that it can happen to a local girl who meets a handsome European prince in a Sydney bar during the 2000 Olympics is amazing. Now she's this beautiful princess in a castle."
Charles spent part of yesterday in Alice Springs meeting Aboriginal people, inspecting a dunny (a bush toilet) and examining, but not eating, three witchetty bugs.
Once he and Princess Mary head back for Europe next week, Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden arrives in Australia for a Swedish festival encompassing everything from Abba revivals to Volvo cars.
The Republic of Australia seems a long way off. . .