Glamour girl with a camera

WAR TIME PIN-UP, PHOTOGRAPHER

21-5-1919 4-3-2010

By MADELEINE HAMILTON

A SUCCESS both sides of the lens, Adelie Hurley, whose wartime pin-up poses led to a career behind the camera as a highly regarded press and commercial photographer, has died in Coffs Harbour, aged 90. Her immaculate presentation and gutsy persona testified to a professional life that revolved around two competing drives: feminine glamour and the challenges of making it in a man's world.

She was also in the media in recent years due to interest in her father, Antarctic and war photographer Frank Hurley. It was rare that she had the opportunity to discuss her own life and career, so she was delighted to be the main subject of both an SBS documentary Paper Dolls, and my book Our Girls.

As children Hurley and her identical twin Toni were accustomed to receiving attention from strangers. Their mother, Antoinette (a French-born opera singer) dressed the girls in beautiful matching clothes and pushed them around Sydney's posh suburb of Vaucluse in a custom-made two-seat stroller.

Their father's fame also meant the pair received special attention at school, often talking to class about his travels, aiding their presentations with artefacts such as spears, shields and drums that Captain Hurley had controversially acquired in New Guinea.

The twins were different from their classmates. They hated wearing uniforms and participating in team sports. Raised by parents who valued independence and creativity, Adelie, in particular, bridled at routine. This frustration continued

when she left school at 17 to study commercial art at East Sydney Technical College.

Bored, she left before graduating, eventually working at Snows department store, selling perfume. Her modelling career began when a manager asked her to be photographed for the store catalogue.

Over the next three years Hurley modelled for knitting books, as mannequin for the stores David Jones and Farmers, and a good set of legs got her work modelling stockings.

Such physical attributes led to regular appearances in Pix magazine and the Sydney Sun newspaper as a typical Australian beach girl - "always at the beach or looking through a shark net or looking through a palm tree with a towel wrapped around your head like a turban".

Because Hurley's modelling career coincided with the outbreak of World War II she was rapidly swept up into the pin-up girl phenomenon. For her, swimsuit poses were simply an income earner, but for many Australian servicemen stationed all over Australia and overseas, such images had stronger resonances.

Pinned or pasted to any available surface, and at constant risk of deterioration and fading in the extreme conditions of tropical and desert war zones, pin-up pictures were ephemeral but highly valued objects. The attachment Australian servicemen felt for pin-up girls had a strong emotional as well as fantasy element: pin-ups reminded many of the girls back home for whose freedom and wellbeing they believed they were fighting. Like many other Australian pin-up girls, Hurley was inundated with letters from servicemen.

Surrounded by her father's cameras and photographs, it had never previously occurred to her that she could be a professional photographer. A family friend loaned her a Graflex camera with which she took some bathing beauty photographs of her sister, Yvonne. She submitted one of these snaps to Pix and was awarded a prize for her efforts.

She was determined to pursue her new interest. With good contacts at Pix as a model, she enlisted the advice of staff photographers. The magazine happily accepted her first photo story about "a very pretty girl, lovely figure, who lived on Goat Island".

She gained a job at Sydney's Daily Mirror as one of Australia's first female press photographers. Then, at the rival Sun, she became the first photographer to have a different front-page photograph in three separate editions. Finally she joined the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Then, in the last years of the war, she married American serviceman Edward McGinty and moved to San Francisco. Like many such wartime unions her marriage rapidly foundered and she returned to Australia and a series of jobs with Sydney newspapers. Ever restless, Hurley spent much of the 1950s as a freelance photographer, living in various parts of Australia and shooting advertisements, landscapes for calendars and pin-ups for newspapers and men's magazines.

She found she was a natural pin-up photographer. Her own successful cover girl career gave her an eye for attractive pin-up images. Hurley was keen to ensure that her pin-ups, while "a little bit sexy looking", were tasteful. She recalled: "A lot of the bosom was completely covered up but you could see the beautiful shapes and all this sort of thing."

The demand for increasingly explicit pin-ups with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s caused her to lose interest. She worked for magazines, including Women's Weekly, but after a third failed marriage she realised she hated life in the suburbs and was her happiest driving in her car on her own all over Australia photographing landscapes and people. "I was really married to the camera. That was enough fulfilment for me."

She is survived by her sister.