TOP PHOTOGRAPHER

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31539, 29 November 1967, Page 2

TOP PHOTOGRAPHER

Captain Frank Hurley, official photographer with the Australian forces in the Middle East, looked over the shoulder of an Australian trooper at El Alamein to see what he was reading. It was a picture story of an army camp back home.

"My God!” he exclaimed, when he saw the credit line. “She’s a photographer too.” He did not even know his young daughter, Adelie, had a camera.

Tailing the story in Christchurch last evening, Adelie Hurley said that her father, a famous Antarctic explorer, author, and photographer, never actually told her be was proud of her. "But he paid me the supreme compliment of buying from me about 50 coloured pictures of Queensland and New South Wales scenes about two years before he died.

“And do you know what he did with them’ He sold them as his own work for a fabulous sum. I did not mind. It was a standing joke around Sydney, though,” she said.

But Captain Hurley left her his entire collection of cameras and equipment when he died five years ago. Miss Hurley, regarded as one of the world’s top women photographers, is in Christchurch now as leader of a party of 30 Australian amateur photographers.

"We intend to spend all our time in the South Island—this is where the scenery is,” ■he said.

After 19 years as the only woman press photographer (until recently) in Sydney, Miss Hurley is now a freelance, taking scenic colour pictures for calendars and doing features for the Australian “Women’s Weekly.” She will do a pictorial feature of her present “safari” for the same magazine and will discuss the New Zealand tour on the Sydney television programme. “In Town Tonight,” when she returns borne. Self-Proteetion As a news photographer in a tough and highly competitive men’s world, Adelie Hurley developed her own selfprotective technique. “Unless a picture had to be

taken as an immediate news flash, I would ask myself: ‘Why get killed in the rush?’ Then, after all the others had finished with some V.1.P., I would pose him in a different way,” she said. Adelie Hurley, a woman who enjoys being involved in life and savours the spice of risk, has climbed the tallest chimney stack in Sydney for an exclusive picture. ‘This was my most terrifying assignment,” she said. “I had to practically do the splits to get from one rung on the stack to the next, with my knees knocking together as they passed.” The picture she risked her life for was never used. But that was all in a day’s work too.

She has descended by a 200 ft wire ladder into the depths of one of the Jenoleon Caves, crawling on her stomach in water to get the shots she needed. “We were down there for eight hours. It took me days to straighten my back,” she said. Arrested When a Japanese submarine shelled Sydney during the Second World War, she was sent to get a picture of the bomb disposal unit at work. “The Army would not let anyone near, so I climbed over back fences to get to the site and hid behind a hyderangea bush, popping up to get a shot every now and then. Just before the army took me in, I handed my camera to my driver and told him to rush it to the office. 1 was detained for two hours, but the pictures got in,” she said. Miss Hurley has travelled extensively on assignment and was “Pix” representative on the west coast of the United States for several years. She has toured Russia and India for Australian weeklies. Miss Hurley was named Adelie by her father, after Adelie Land in the Antarctic. She is married to Mr Philip Harrison, who is in “the car business” and is a successful amateur artist Old Giris’ Assn.—A former pupil of Christchurch Girls’ High School was the guest speaker at a recent meeting of the Old Giris’ Association. She was Miss Lois Tucker who gave an illustrated account of her journey through the Far East on her journey home from the University of Hawaii.