The welcoming and Nordically lovely eyes of Trans Australia Airlines' Nola Rose follow you around one room of the National Library of Australia's new exhibition The Sell. In another room of the exhibition one is stalked by the manly but hungry gaze (for he is hungering for the nation's votes) of the Liberal Party's John Howard.
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Both of these famous Australians appear in advertising posters in this "banquet" (exhibition curator Susannah Helman's word at Tuesday's media preview) served from the library's rich holdings of Australian advertising matter.
"This exhibition is about 200 years of Australian advertising," curator Helman explained on Tuesday.
"We travel through time from a 1796 playbill [advertising a melodrama to be performed in Sydney] right through to 1988. The exhibition starts in black and white then becomes a technicolored journey ... It's a very visual exhibition with lots to enjoy. It's a banquet, I think. There are some unexpected things. The exhibition looks at the sorts of tools, for example celebrity endorsement, [as in Paul 'Hoges' Hogan's famous endorsements of Winfield cigarettes and Leah McCartney's endorsement of the Holeproof company's 'Gay Deceiver' sheer nylons] that have been used by advertisers to persuade and inform Australian customers."
To escape John Howard's disconcerting gaze (he looks out, like a vulture from a crag, from a 1998 election poster promising us "A Stronger Australia") The Canberra Times guided Susannah Helman to a safer corner in another room. There, in a 1953 poster, glowingly blonde Nola Rose invited us to fly TAA "The friendly way." Nearby in a 1969 poster a young woman with parrots perched all over her invited the world's tourists to visit "Australia - A Land of Friendly Birds."
There are many refreshingly politically incorrect (because they are so dated) things in the exhibition and Susannah Helman points out that the "Friendly Birds" message is a pun saying that the parrot-covered young woman (she is at Currumbin Bird Sanctuary on the Gold Coast) is a "friendly bird".
"I think we wouldn't say this kind of thing nowadays," the curator mused, correctly.
She went on to explain that the golden Nola Rose was discovered at a beauty pageant on Bondi beach. The beauty went on to be TAA's radiant poster girl (dressed as a welcoming hostie) for decades. Another famous face launched a thousand ships but Nola's is the face that surely launched a million bookings (with TAA).
It is hard to measure the intensity of political incorrectness. And yet, on a 10 point scale one of the exhibition's early posters, featuring a very black Aboriginal wearing a dazzlingly white Pelaco shirt and about to throw a boomerang (the message is that like a boomerang you will come back, again and again, to Pelaco shirts), is about a 7.5. Today the newsworthy Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes such an ad unthinkable.
Blush-making advertising artefacts in the exhibition include a 1956 ad for the 'Charm' Bust Developer. It features an unforgettable picture of a woman, standing in profile, for whom the product has worked awesome wonders.
The Sell. Australian Advertising 1790s to 1990s, opens on Wednesday and continues until 25 April 2017.
