Maggie Tabberer AO (b. 1936) is one of Australia's best-known personalities. 'Discovered' by photographer Helmut Newton in Melbourne when she was 23, by 1960 she was Australia's Model of the Year. In 1963 she began writing a fashion column for the Daily Mirror and became a television panellist on Beauty and the Beast the following year. By the end of the decade she had her own daily chat show, Maggie, and won Gold Logies in both 1970 and 1971. She started a public relations company, Maggie Tabberer and Associates, and was fashion editor of the Australian Women's Weekly from 1981 to 1996. Also in 1981, she launched her own clothing label, Maggie T, which closed stand-alone stores in 2018 but continued in modified form within Millers. She returned to television in 1995 with a lifestyle series on ABC, followed by Maggie … At Home With on the pay television channel Bio from 2005.
When Alana Landsberry was a baby, her photographer father took her to a shoot he did with Maggie Tabberer, and Maggie held Alana while he set up his equipment. Decades later, when Alana went to the Southern Highlands to photograph Maggie for the Australian Women's Weekly, she took her own baby son, and Maggie held him, too. At the sitting Maggie said: 'This will most likely be the last time I sit in front of a camera like this, darling. So let's make it count.'
Gift of Alana Landsberry and Bauer Media Australia 2019
© Bauer Media Pty Ltd
Alana Landsberry (2 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Well behaved women seldom make history, as the saying goes, and the National Portrait Gallery, consequently, is full of awesome Australian women who refused to conform to narrow ideas about their place and their worth.
Featuring striking photographic portraits of contemporary figures from the National Portrait Gallery collection, The Look is an aesthetic treat with a lashing of je ne sais quoi.
