Move over, Errol Flynn. It took long enough, but as of last Tuesday you are no longer Tasmania’s most popular human export. I suppose there are a few million subcontinental Ricky Ponting fans who might have said the same a decade ago, but the only Taswegian who’s had more foreign front page column inches than Mary (née) Donaldson in the last half century is a man called Martin Bryant, who, since giving our smallest state the world’s highest per capita murder rate has become nothing more than a bad memory for the rest of us. We can only be thankful that, unlike NSW copycat Brendon Tarrant of Christchurch mosque infamy, Bryant never exported his evil. The sooner we forget them both the better.

But Queen Mary will always have a place in our collective heart, notwithstanding the mortal wound she has inflicted on an Australian Republican Movement that was still reeling from the popularity of the coronation of the man who is now Mary’s several-times-removed cousin. If not quite Hans Andersen material, her trajectory from Sydney ad agency to Scandinavian palace has more than a whiff of fairy tale about it and parallels with at least one of the Disney fantasies I remember taking my daughter to see. As the inventor of swashbuckling, Flynn was also royalty of a kind during the decades remembered as Hollywood’s ‘Golden Age’. But he would never have been invited to follow Grace Kelly up the aisle of a real European cathedral or be allowed to park his arse on a real Old World throne. Not so much because of his reputation as an incorrigible womaniser, but because of the rumours of bisexuality which began circulating after Truman Capote claimed to have bedded him, and which bedevilled the Tasmanian (geddit?) until his death ten years later. But while being outed may have closed a few doors to a global celebrity in 1940s Hollywood, it would have been considerably more career-limiting for a nobody in the Hobart of Flynn’s youth. And things didn’t get much better for LGB Taswegians for a long time after his demise, either. Tasmania was not just the last Australian state to decriminalise homosexuality; it was the last jurisdiction in the Anglosphere to do so, and younger Speccie readers may be shocked to learn that it continued to be illegal for two consenting male Taswegians to get jiggy in the privacy of their own homes until 1997. Even then, Tassie judges were still so wedded to the statutes they’d inherited from their be-wigged and Bible-thumping 19th century British counterparts, and still so keen on incarcerating people for what those statutes referred to as ‘indecent acts’, that the federal government needed the intervention of the UN Court of Human Rights to put a stop to it. There have been other areas of progressive legislation where Tasmania has not lagged behind the other states, or course, and one where it even led the world. You don’t hear it much these days, but it used to be said of Tasmanians that many of them have two heads, the result of the unchecked interbreeding which proliferates in small isolated communities. Needless to say, births of two-headed babies have never been more common in Tasmania than in any other state and territory. But the urban myth does have some scientific provenance. We now know that one of the effects of the last ice age was to leach all the iodine out of Tasmania’s topsoil. But it was not until the late-19th century that doctors traced the disproportionately high incidence of football-sized goitres on the necks of Tasmanians to a deficiency of iodine in their diet. The Tassie government responded by being the first government anywhere in the world to mandate dietary supplements to the diets of children and pregnant women. And let’s not forget that Tasmania was also where Australia’s environmental movement started, when a bunch of smelly hippies lay down in front of some bulldozers to stop the construction of a dam on the Franklin River. How ironic, then, that the leader of those hippies, Green party-founding Tasmanian Bob Brown, is now tilting quixotically at wind turbines in the Bass Strait. Less a case of chickens coming home to roost, you might say, than wedge-tailed eagles dying in the attempt.