Event: Our Girls: Aussie Pin-ups of the 40s and 50s
Book launch: Our Girls: Aussie Pin-ups of the 40s and 50s by Madeleine Hamilton
The latest offering from boutique Melbourne publishing house Arcade Publications has seen the group take a step back from their intensely hometown focus and embrace the national story of Australian pin-up girls from the 1940s and 50s. It was fitting then that the launch of this book would include a foray north to share the love with Sydney. Trespass was there with open arms.
Photos and reports from the lavish Melbourne launch, which included a 50s era vintage fashion parade, music and dancing, led me to don my best 50s-style dress, but the Sydney launch was a far more sedate and academic affair – cheese, wine and a Q&A session with the author and one of the original Aussie pin-ups, the glamorous Margherita Hambly.
The cacophonous traffic and planes outside and above Berkelouw Books on Norton Street, Leichhardt, gave the visitors a noisy welcome but inside all ears were tuned to Our Girls author Madeleine Hamilton as she spoke about the ordinary women who posed for magazines such as Pix, which were a vital link to a happy home far away for men on the frontlines of World War II.
Dale Campisi and Madeleine Hamilton
War is an intensely lonely ordeal and many homesick, lonely men wrote letters to the Aussie girls – some essential source material for Madeleine as she researched the PhD thesis upon which her book is based. As she tracked down the models they frequently produced boxes filled with letters they had received from servicemen. Instead of finding the letters lascivious or obscene, Madeleine discovered they were poignant and gentle, thanking the women for brightening their day, expressing their desire for normality by asking the girls out to dinner upon their return home. The tragedy is that many of them never made it home.
But it wasn’t all a sad affair. Madeleine touched on how the pin-up scene was initially imported from America but then rapidly Australianised. The Aussie girls promoted patriotism: instead of those extravagant American women who spent their days lounging about in lingerie smoking and drinking, Australian women were wholesome, outdoorsy and healthy – real girls-next-door. These were natural women, with soft, feminine bodies, and the photos in Our Girls are simply glorious. Like the best glowing photos of triumphant summers, they are gorgeously nostalgic and curiously innocent.
Pin-up girl Margherita Hambly (née Margaret Potter, before marriage and a prolonged stay in Italy) spoke about being a model in the 1950s and its pros and cons. Friends were told not to associate with her any longer and her reputation was tarnished. When she married, her groom’s parents refused to attend the wedding. But it also gave her better clothes, a roaring social life and, importantly, greater financial independence, a vital step on the path of the women’s liberation movement.
Our Girls fits perfectly into Arcade’s exclusive stable of publications, with its focus on story-telling and tangible history. Extremely tangible, as a matter of fact. Arcade’s books are all palm-sized A6, beautifully designed and full of gorgeous pictures. It was a change of mindset for Madeleine to distil a 90,000-word work of academia into a pocket-sized collection of fascinating tales but she is adamant that it forced her to focus on the stories of these amazing women and bring them to life.
And they live on, smiling proudly from the pages of Our Girls, finally given the Aussie attention they deserve.
Look for Our Girls in any good bookshop or order directly through Dennis Jones & Associates – it makes the perfect gift for that retro-obsessed friend or relative this Christmas! For more on pin-up girls, check out the exhibition Of Love and War running until May 5 at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Read Trespass’s review of Aussie Pin Ups here.
Visit Arcade Publications here.
