The woman behind the lens

In an age when only men held cameras, pioneering Australian Women's Weekly staff photographer Adelie Hurley would break boundaries - and produce incredible imagery at the same time.

- TIFFANY DUNK

Onlookers stopped in the street to take in an unusual sight. A photographer was clambering up the chimney stack of a Sydney brewery to get the winning shot … while wearing high heels.

It was 1938 and this was the first freelance assignment Adelie Hurley was given for Pix newspaper. She’d been turned down for plenty of other jobs, the gigs inevitably going to her male peers. But little did the men who doubted her then – or in the decades to follow – know that Adelie was made of far tougher stuff than they’d given her credit for. As the first female photojournalist, and one of only three to work in Australia in the years after World War II, the hurdles and stereotypes she faced only strengthened her desire for success in the male-dominated newspaper world.

“With determination, talent and initiative, she forged her career,” Adelie’s niece Flip Byrnes would later marvel. “And in doing so, paved the way for female photojournalists in Australia.”

Life in focus 

Born on May 21, 1919, Adelie was one of four children of pioneering Antarctic explorer and World War I photographer Frank Hurley and his wife, Antoinette, a French-born singer. Frank’s far-flung work meant that during her formative years he was rarely home. But when he was fleetingly there, Frank would enlist Adelie, along with her three siblings Toni, Frank Jr and Yvonne, to help develop his pictures.

“We would sit on the stairs outside while he sat in his dark room,” Adelie’s twin, Toni, said of the routine. “We would have a stopwatch and when the time was up, we had to call out to him. We were close to him that way, but we could never jump on his lap and cuddle him.”