Edwina McCann’s editor’s letter: November 2019

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28th Oct 2019

This issue, featuring the gorgeous Bella Hadid, was brought together in the shadow of the next, the December issue, in which we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of Australia. But that doesn’t mean it was given any less consideration, love or care by the team; in fact, quite the contrary. Editing this edition has taught me the need to re-evaluate the past – not delete it – as we move things forward.

Australia was originally launched as a supplement within UK . It wasn’t until 1959 that we published our first independent, standalone magazine, with Dame Helen Mirren’s cousin on the cover, shot by the great Norman Parkinson.

While poring over those early issues at the State Library of NSW, where they keep a full collection (as does the National Library of Australia in Canberra), regular contributor Jody Scott came across an extraordinary account of Australia at the time, written by a visiting American journalist, Marilyn Mercer, and published for US audiences, titled Australia: a man’s world, for better or worse? It was reprinted in our in 1962 with an invitation for readers to write in with their reaction to her views, and five guineas was offered for the best letter on the theme.

Mercer reported that Australians were much like Americans: we were independent, friendly and intensely democratic (men sat in the front of taxis, we didn’t tip and even the rich didn’t have many household servants) but also “curiously apathetic”. She noted that no-one worked very hard in Sydney, we knocked off early and went to the beach, and were committed to the “good life”. “They are more given to appreciating culture dutifully than to creating it,” she added.

Her headline about a man’s world was largely drawn from her observation that sports dominated; that Australian women preferred the role of “pioneer women in the home” to independence; and her attendance at a cocktail party at a Sydney press club, where men and women were separated (at the time, it was the norm in drinking establishments and clubs).

She wrote: “Their aborigines, like our American Indians, largely cling to their own ways and take little part in Australian life.” No mention of the fact Indigenous Australians were only given the right to enrol to vote that same year, and so therefore were considered citizens for the first time, but in reality were still living under a form of apartheid.

While reading Mercer’s story today is fascinating, it is also rather uncomfortable. It might be easier to ignore both it and other stories, such as ‘How to Manage a Woman’ by Abe Burrows, which includes the advice: “never leave her cigarette unlit …”. Looking back at covers from the 90s, I’m bewildered to think we featured young teens. But I strongly believe that censoring the content of the past is a certain way to repeat mistakes in the future. I am also strongly opposed to artistic censorship of historic work.

In re-examining the social mores of the 60s, we reconsidered some of the work of the great photographers of the time, including Sam Haskins, specifically his book, . Sam retired to Australia in 2002 and passed away seven years later. While Sam did not shoot for , he did some of his last work with our fashion director, Christine Centenera, which was published by me because I was introduced to him by his friend and a regular collaborator, Alison Veness, who is today ’s creative director at large.

To be clear, Haskins was a talented artist and his pictures are a study in the sexuality and beauty of the time. There has never been, and there is not, any suggestion of impropriety. But I wondered if I would be bold enough to publish anything even slightly as risqué as his work today for fear of it seeming to objectify the subject. And so we sent creative boards to Bella and asked if she was comfortable referencing Haskins’s work to create a modern for this month’s issue. She was and found the whole creative process empowering. I hope that with these images and the accompanying story, we might start a conversation about resisting the temptation to wipe away years of past work because it doesn’t sit comfortably with today’s mores.

Victorians used a fig leaf to cover the genitals of a statue of cast so as not to upset the Queen, while Pope Paul IV decreed the use of fig leaves back in the 16th century. In the 1600s, Pope Innocent X went one step further, castrating nude sculptures throughout the Vatican. In the 1930s, the Spanish featured a Goya nude on a stamp, but the US postage service refused to deliver any letters carrying it. Nazis and religious zealots burned books. Artistic censorship has never served humanity well, nor created a more moral world.

Talking of publishing and forever protecting the extraordinary work of great artists, this month we sadly bid farewell to one of the giants of image-making, Peter Lindbergh. At Australia, we will be forever grateful for the work he did for us, including a groundbreaking cover of Naomi Campbell in 1997 and, most recently, for capturing Emma Watson for the issue dedicated to sustainability that she guest-edited in 2018. He was a kind man and a true artist; he made careers and supported friends. The legacy of his work should be forever admired and appreciated by future generations.

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