Adorning the walls of Bendigo's renowned art gallery are snapshots of Australian culture and history, as depicted by the covers of one of the country's most influential publications.
The gallery's latest exhibition, The Australian Women's Weekly: 90 Years of an Australian Icon, celebrates a milestone and showcases life as its readers have known it throughout the decades.
"The reach of the Australian Women's Weekly is really extraordinary," said curator Lauren Ellis.
"One historian estimates that at one point in history, 1 in 4 Australians read the paper."
Former editor Deborah Thomas said the Weekly made a name for itself in its early days with its coverage of all things news, royals, food and fashion — and its coloured photographs.
"People turned to it to really find out what was happening at home, in the country, and also particularly in the UK," she said.
What's in the exhibition?
From the outset, visitors to the exhibition are immersed in fashion.
There are gowns worn by celebrities and royalty, including Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.
Delve further into the gallery, and you'll find garments readers were able to replicate using patterns from the magazine, including a crochet wedding dress from the 1970s.
At the time, the Weekly billed crocheted gown as "the year's most beautiful wedding dress".
There are cookbooks and crafts, with an entire room devoted to perhaps the best-known of the Women's Weekly publications: The iconic children's birthday cake book.
Within days, a community call-out saw 3,000 photographs sent to the gallery of readers' Women's Weekly birthday cake masterpieces.
"We've been able to pull together about 1,000 of those pictures to create a really beautiful snapshot of all those happy birthday memories," Ms Ellis said.
'Women doing extraordinary things'
Behind the magazine, women have been blazing a trail, including two of Australia's first female war correspondents, Dorothy Drain and Adele 'Tilly' Shelton-Smith.
Included in the exhibition are some of their belongings, including Drain's press pass and a letter from the Women's Weekly's founder, Sir Frank Packer.
Drain's reporting took her to theatres of war, including Malaya, Korea and Vietnam.
Her nephew, former High Court justice Kenneth Hayne, said Drain saw firsthand the horrors of Hiroshima within a year of the bomb dropping.
"She was part of a group of women who were doing extraordinary things for their time, but who were doing extraordinary things for any time," Mr Hayne said.
Drain went on to become the editor of the Weekly, before she retired in 1975.
"The Weekly would be read by most in the household and would be the way in which they would gather their news," Mr Hayne said.
His aunt always wanted to provoke readers to learn and think about the issues she was covering.
"For her, it was very important that the Weekly had that intellectual grit and content in it … of that, she was proud," Mr Hayne said.
He recounted a conversation when Drain spoke to him about her time covering global conflicts.
"The Americans didn't know what to do with us, dear," she told him.
"They couldn't cope with the fact they had a woman."
Looking to the future
The parts of the exhibition devoted to the women who helped build the magazine, including Drain, were the exhibits the Weekly's current editor Nicole Byers was most excited to see.
Many of Australia's hard-copy magazines have disappeared from newsagency shelves, folding under the pressures of a digital world.
But Ms Byers believes the Weekly will live on.
"There's a lot of digital transformation that's happening to media now," she said.
"It really gives us the opportunity to bring the content that has been around for such a long time, and the brand that's endured, to a whole new audience."
The exhibition opens on May 27 and will run until August 27.
