Where zany hot girls and fake news was just another day at the office

Before the launch of red-hot tabloid magazine Pix, glamour happened overseas, nobody had heard of crowdsourcing or fake news, and newspapers had yet to discover the pulling power of a cover girl.

From 1938 to 1972, the weekly called Pix fixed that. A new exhibition, Pix: The magazine that changed everything, opens on Friday at the State Library of NSW. It includes 250 images and covers picked by curator Margot Riley.

Pix not only showcased work by Australia’s first photojournalists, it asked the public to submit their own images and showed readers how to use “tricks of the trade”.

“This week’s cover photo, which shows Shirley Corrighan skiing happily in an all-white world, was faked,” it wrote in 1947. “There’s no need to go to the snow country.”

Launched on the same day as the pomp and ceremony of the 150th anniversary of governor Phillip’s landing at Farm Cove, Pix was an overnight sensation. Riley said it landed “almost like an explosion”.

“It was so modern and so different. It challenged that historical weightiness of the past with this energy. It would change the way people got their news,” she said.

The nation’s first pictorial news weekly, Pix covered national and global current events alongside candid photos of Australians at work and play, Riley said.

It combined stranger-than-fiction articles with serious coverage, ranging from World War II to later shocking developments such as share houses, where men and women lived together.

Its inaugural issue included a sensational photo story on Paul Schollkopf, aka “the Human Pincushion”, a man known for his eye-watering feats of body piercing.

It was also a launching pad for Australian models and writers, many of whom went on to have careers around the world.

Curator Margot Riley in the exhibition space.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Now known as a feminist author and journalist, Barbara Toner was a teenage copygirl at Pix in 1967 when she was assigned to write two columns. “My job was to wear a miniskirt and be zany. That was it. It couldn’t have been more sexist.”

Appointed by the editor Bob Nelson to appeal to a younger “with-it” demographic, Toner said, “I was ‘with it’ because he was ‘without it’. I was a 17-year-old woman and he was a 55-year-old man.”

It was great training, Toner said, and the magazine was far more substantial than the bikini-clad models on its covers suggested. “They needed to get the blokes in to read it. I wrote feminist books the minute I left.”

Pix cover girl Judith Lorentz was considered Australia’s answer to Audrey Hepburn.

Judith Lorentz now and as a model for the March 15, 1958 cover of Pix magazine.

She was discovered working at her Czech family’s health food business in Drummoyne when the 1954 movie Sabrina with Hepburn – who had recently starred in Roman Holiday (1953) – was playing at a cinema around the corner.

“Everyone came in saying ‘you look like Audrey Hepburn’,” she recalled.

She had European glamour. “Most of the models were tall, blonde with fair skin,” she recalled this year. “I had olive skin, dark hair, and I could easily be taken for Italian.”

In Pix, the photo was the thing, words were few, the headlines were attention-grabbing. And the captions were funny and sharp.

Its first issue in 1938 featured “Lovely Girls in Striking Bathing Suits”. Young socialites wining and dining at Palm Beach were shown wearing skimpy shorts and two-piece bathers, showing no regard for the regulation banning “bralettes” (bikini sets).

Photos of their beautiful holiday homes, such as Kalua with 96 varieties of hydrangeas, were contrasted with a photo of a shed, with a caption saying it was available as a holiday rental for a fraction of the price of the mansions.

Scantily dressed young partygoers drinking at midnight were shown next to an image, captioned, “Same beach, different angle,” of an older couple sitting fully dressed on the beach.

Barbara Toner working for the magazine.Credit: Pix magazine

Pix regularly featured Hollywood starlets, with Dorothy Lamour in the first issue. But it would increasingly showcase fresh-faced local girls discovered by the magazine’s photographers.

Riley said before Pix launched, Australians didn’t understand glamour. “It taught people how to look like movie stars and cover girls, how to put your make-up on, how to pose and dress, all of that,” she said.

“We didn’t really have a fashion magazine in Australia [then].”

Pix is one of eight free exhibitions for the public next year, said State Librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon. It was a taste of what she forecasts will be a “year-long program [in 2025] filled with transformative storytelling, compelling events, and unforgettable experiences”.

Riley spent more than a year trawling through 167,000 images and 1700 issues of Pix in the library’s collection. The archive does not include images submitted by the public.

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