The Quest For Brains And Beauty

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 21, 2006

STEVE MEACHAM

Miss Australia was more than just a pretty girl; she represented the nation to the world.

LET'S GET THIS straight. Brad Rodgers never had to wear a dress. Or a bathing suit, sash or crown - despite the ribbing he took from "a few drunks at the Melbourne Cup".

Nine years ago, Rodgers - then a 28-year-old Myer store executive - became the only man to enter and win the Miss Australia competition. Not that he got the title. Despite raising the highest amount of money for charity, the organisers decided the world wasn't ready for a male incumbent, awarding him the new title "national fund-raiser" instead.

Today Rodgers manages the Myer store in Sydney's Castle Hill but in 1997 he found himself front-page news - the man who was holding up to ridicule a 90-year-old national institution. And yet, Rodgers says, he never set out to be subversive - even though his "victory" is cited as one of the reasons the competition was scrapped three years later.

Sophie Jensen, a senior curator with the National Museum of Australia, has spent the past two years exploring the competitions complex history for the museum's new touring exhibition, Miss Australia: A Nation's Quest, which opened in Brisbane this month.

To Jensen, what makes Miss Australia such a fascinating subject is that for the best part of a century it was a mirror on the nation. Through its many different guises, sponsors and name changes, it came to reflect "the changing notion of Australian womanhood".

Unlike Miss America, for example, the Australian competition was never just a beauty pageant. Jensen says the 1927 winner, Phyllis von Alwyn, was quite shocked when she attended the American equivalent, noting in her diary that "you don't have to be intelligent to be Miss America ... whereas we are judged on our intelligence, our poise and our conversation".

The first Miss Australia, sponsored by Lone Hand magazine in 1907, was Alice Buckridge - described as "a wholesome girl who enjoys playing sport, never goes to dances or uses face powders".

But the event's golden era was the 1950s and '60s under the stewardship of businessman Bernard Dowd, who Jensen describes as "a huge driving force who used the event to promote his company Hickory Lingerie".

In 1954, Dowd linked the event to the Australian Cerebral Palsy Association. It seemed an unbeatable combination: beautiful women, glamorous outfits, glittering venues, a good cause. No wonder the event became the charity's primary source of income, raising an estimated $90 million by the time Sheree Primmer, the final Miss Australia, was named in 2000.

"It was an interesting alliance," Jensen says. "But by the 1980s people were really beginning to question whether it was an appropriate way of raising money for people with disabilities." Feminist groups had long protested outside the venues. Increasingly, they were joined by lobby groups for the disabled.

Jensen says "beauty of face, beauty of figure" were always an important part of the judging process, though bathing suits were involved only in the early years. Consequently, the faces of the winners reveal much about the changing ideals of beauty across the generations.

A key moment came in 1961 with the triumph of Tania Verstak, the first naturalised Australian to win the title. "The fact Tania was born overseas - in China, to Russian parents - was considered a big thing at the time. That a new Australian could win Miss Australia felt like a huge leap." She went on to win the Miss International pageant - the only Miss Australia to do so.

The only indigenous woman to win the national award, Kathryn Hay, was appointed in 1999. Hay subsequently became a Tasmanian politician.

But where Miss Australia really differed from other competitions around the world was that the winners were expected to be, in Jensen's phrase, "an ambassadress for the nation". They were portrayed as living embodiments of Australian culture, sent overseas to promote everything from Australian fruit to Australian fashion, dressed in entire wardrobes of superfine Australian wool.

They toiled to promote the quest domestically, too. Particularly in the '50s and '60s, when each Miss Australia was loaded into a car to crisscross the country for a relentless diet of bush balls and lamington drives. For all that, Jensen says each former Miss Australia she has spoken to recalls her reign with affection. "They are universally proud of what they did and what they achieved. They say it was an exhausting year, but a lot of fun."