Avoice, a force, and a friend

Since 1933 The Weekly has championed women and changed the face of Australia along the way. From rallying for equal rights to revealing the recipe for the perfect sponge, we revisit a trailblazing 90-year journey of our sister magazine.

- GENEVIEVE GANNON

In 1947 The Australian Women's Weekly correspondent Anne Matheson was crossing the grassy plains of South Africa on the King's train; her tape recorder clutched in her whitegloved hand. Despite the oppressive heat, she and her press corps peers maintained an impeccable standard of dress. Anne's dispatches included the only press interview the Queen consort ever gave, but Anne had discretly omitted spotting Princess Elizabeth sneaking out each morning to take a secret call from her beau, Philip Mountbatten. "There we were by the Zambezi River, with crocodiles nibbling our toes and the Queen in champagne georgette and frills," Anne recalled in 1976.

Africa was the first of dozens of royal tours Anne covered after proving her mettle in World War II. Female war correspondents were rare, unless you read The Weekly, who sent Adele Shelton Smith to Malaya in 1941, and Dorothy Drain to cover the war crimes trials in Tokyo in 1946. Dorothy was later deployed to Korea and Vietnam. These journalists blazed a trail for female war correspondents today.

Despite the war office's orders that female correspondents write from a woman's perspective, Anne insisted on covering all aspects of conflict. Her report on the capture of German Vice-chancellor Hermann Göring in 1945 was syndicated across the world.

"When he crossed his legs, I could see Hermann was wearing grey silk socks nearly as long as a woman's stockings. They wrinkled around his fat ankles," she observed of the Nazi who created the Gestapo.