June Dally Watkins

June Dally-Watkins OAM (1927–2020), model, deportment icon and entrepreneur, grew up on a property at Watsons Creek in the New England district of New South Wales. After suffering many insults as the daughter of a single mother, as a teenager she was noticed on a Tamworth street by a photographer, who encouraged her to move to Sydney and try her luck at modelling. She described herself as 'looking like a milkmaid' at the time she scored her first assignments for major department stores, but she was named Model of the Year in 1949. Catwalk shows for David Jones followed, along with contracts for magazines including the Australian Women's Weekly and Woman's Day. At the age of 22, in 1950, she established the June Dally-Watkins School, which has since trained countless students in deportment and etiquette in Sydney and Brisbane. The following year she established Australia's first modelling agency and, later, a business college. Famously romanced by actor Gregory Peck during a visit to Rome in the 1950s, she returned to Australia to continue her career, marry and raise four children. In 1969 she published The June Dally-Watkins Book of Manners for Moderns. Dally-Watkins took her etiquette lessons to students in China in 2013, co-founding the Dally Institute in Guangzhou. Her autobiography The Secrets Behind My Smile was published in 2002. Dally-Watkins died at the age of 92, leaving a lasting legacy not only on the Australian modelling industry, but on the thousands of students to whom she imparted impeccable manners and a knowledge of etiquette.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2017
© Robert McFarlane/Copyright Agency, 2021