Cakes, frocks and war correspondents: 90 years of Australian Women’s Weekly

Since its original publication in 1980, the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake book has become a national treasure. So when Bendigo Art Gallery asked members of the public to send in photos of their attempts at the recipes, curator Lauren Ellis was flooded.

“We did a call out thinking we might get a few dozen, that would be cute,” she told the Guardian. “We got more than 3,000 within a matter of days.

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“We really didn’t realise what a phenomenal cultural icon this book was. And because it was published in the 1980s, it spans multiple generations. We got photos like, ‘Here’s me at my third birthday party in the 1980s, and then my parents remade it for my 40th’.”

The photographs are now on display in Bendigo Art Gallery, as part of the new exhibition titled the Australian Women’s Weekly: 90 Years of an Australian Icon.

The show celebrates a magazine which, across nine decades, has provided generations of women – and a fair few men – with what feminist writer Janice Winship aptly described as a manual of “survival skills and daydreams”.

Among the items on display are a crochet wedding dress from 1976, made from a Weekly pattern; the Jenny Kee “Blinky Di” koala knit, inspired by the one worn by Diana, Princess of Wales while pregnant with Prince William; the Chinese Cooking Class book that has sold more than 4m copies since 1978; relationship columns; and articles on the creative possibilities of aspic, pineapple and a revolutionary new kitchen appliance called the microwave.

While it’s perhaps best known for its recipes and fashion, the Australian Women’s Weekly’s (AWW’s) commitment to keeping Australian women informed on global news should not be underestimated. The exhibition pays tribute to the women who have worked at the magazine over the decades, including household names such as Ita Buttrose, Maggie Tabberer and Nene King.

It also highlights the work of lesser-known reporters such as Adele “Tilly” Shelton-Smith and Dorothy Drain, who both served as war reporters for the AWW, providing updates on conflicts that involved readers’ husbands, sons and brothers.

As one of Australia’s first female war correspondents, Drain clocked up a remarkable 38 years at the magazine, eventually retiring as editor-in-chief in 1975.

Born into a Calvinist family in Queensland, Drain battled poor eyesight from childhood. She began working as a public servant in Brisbane during the Depression, but boredom prompted her to try for a cadetship with the Brisbane Daily Mail, prior to its merger with the Courier.

In 1936 she moved to Sydney to take up a D-grade reporter position at the Telegraph, and the following year she was recruited by Sir Frank Packer to the AWW, which had launched five years earlier but was already dominating the women’s magazine market.

Drain – who believed war was “no place for anybody, man or woman” – moved into war reporting at the end of the second world war, travelling to Japan to cover the Australians serving with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. There she witnessed the horrifying aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing, and covered the early stages of the war crimes trials in Tokyo for the AWW.

Over the next two decades, Drain reported on Australia’s involvement in the Malayan Emergency from Singapore and Malaya; embedded with a Royal Australian Air Force squadron in Korea in 1950; and covered the Vietnam war in 1965.

“She was part of the first cohort of women that were sent overseas, and going through her memoirs and papers gives an amazing insight into how she negotiated being a woman reporting on men in the theatres of war,” says Ellis. “Like avoiding salty foods and drinking no more than half a cup of tea, because there were no [bathroom] facilities for women on the field.”

Drain and Shelton-Smith faced considerable resistance on assignment, Ellis said, and they were under strict government orders not to report on military matters.

“These women were walking a very nuanced line in terms of how they could report in a way that would satisfy their readership back home, who were desperate for knowledge,” she says.

“But there was concern that having women around might break some kind of manhood code, that they might send back emasculating images – the everyday routine of domestic chores at camp – or expose men’s fears and worries, images that didn’t live up to the kind of heroic soldier that matched the public narrative.

“But Dorothy seemed to have had a real knack for getting the balance right.”

Drain’s nephew, Kenneth Hayne, says that while his aunt’s columns reflected on the “absolute futility and insanity of war”, she was clearly proud of her pioneering status in war journalism.

“In Korea, the Americans were shocked that the Australians were allowing women in a war zone, but her response was, ‘These soldiers have got homes, they have wives they’ve got mothers. Why would a woman not want to report on this?’” he says.

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Hayne recalls Drain, who died in 1996, as “a woman of considerable skill and intelligence”. According to the ANU’s dictionary of biography, she scored a rare interview with Frank Sinatra during his 1955 trip to Australia by “appealing to his intellect and asking him serious questions”.

“She was an engaging woman, very broad-minded, always attuned to what was happening,” says Hayne. “And she had a wicked sense of humour.”

• The Australian Women’s Weekly: 90 Years of an Australian Icon is open at Bendigo Art Gallery until 27 August.