A former cattle station jillaroo from Broome in Western Australia has risen to worldwide fame after a documentary about her unique hat designs won multiple awards in the American and European film festival circuits.
Self-taught milliner Felicity Brown was thrilled to discover the film MadHATtan, which was based on her success, won the special jury prize for bridging cultures at the Arizona International Film Festival and the World Cinema Documentary Feature Award at the Amsterdam Film Festival.
The documentary saw an Australian film crew follow Ms Brown for one of her three shows at New York Fashion Week, where her designs were unprecedented.
"I was the first milliner to showcase at [New York fashion week], the first Australian milliner too in the fashion gallery," she said.
"You used to not see millinery at fashion week but you do now."
She hoped her international success would show young women they didn't have to leave their outback homes to pursue their career dreams.
"If I can inspire them to just have a go at anything, have a go at what their little dream is, don't worry about how big or small it is, and don't worry about what people say and think," she said.
"My whole big thing is that you've just got to have a go, so yes, New York was huge and quite a crazy thing to have a go at but there's no way I was not going to have a go."
From tragedy to opportunity
Ms Brown said her New York success would not have happened if she hadn't rewarded herself with a holiday in the US after winning a frightening battle with two melanomas.
She scrounged a ticket to a Fashion Week show and wrote a blog about it.
The designer she wrote about saw her blog and her hats, and used his influence to get her invited the following year.
"We always question when something traumatic like melanoma happens to us, [like] why on Earth is that happening?" Ms Brown said.
"But my journey wouldn't have been the same journey."
New York Fashion Week is an invitation-only event, but designers fund their own catwalk shows and travel costs.
Ms Brown was asked back this year, but declined due to the cost.
"Bless the fashion gallery, they've asked me back again but I've called it at three [shows], because it will take me a long while to pay it off," she said.
"I will be paying off those three Fashion Week [shows] for the rest of my life."
She was also invited to send a hat for a competition in London and was proud it featured feathers collected for her by local Aboriginal rangers.
"They've been with me right from the start," she said.
"That's where some of my greatest feathers come from."
She also uses local Aboriginal models to showcase her one-of-a-kind designs.
New life for lost feathers
Known for her use of feathers, Ms Brown receives parcels of them from friends and strangers from around the country.
Her favourites include striking large red and black feathers from the red-tailed cockatoo, plumes from the much photographed, rare white peacock that lives at the Sandfire Roadhouse near Broome, and guinea fowl feathers.
"They come to me from all over Australia," she said.
"It's quite a lovely thing to do to preen feathers, it slows you down, it makes you stop and think.
"They're gorgeous and they've all got a story."
A local ambulance officer even brought her a dead owl he found on the side of the road.
"They signify a whole beautiful circle of life," she said.
"A lot of people bring me feathers of a bird that's come to a terrible end so that I will give it a second flight."
Watch this story on Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday.
