Heather George

By 1938, at the age of 31, George had taken up photography professionally and worked at Noel Rubie’s portrait and industrial photography studio in Sydney. Taken by Rubie, a wistful portrait of George, who was an actor and artist as well as a photographer, appears full-page in a 1938 issue of The Home: an Australian quarterly over the caption "Miss Heather George, of Artarmon, is a youthful Sydney artist who has lately abandoned painting for photography". She later practiced at a series of Melbourne and Victorian country photography studios. By the late 1950s George had become a freelance photographer and photojournalist, photographing Sydney’s older suburbs, and stately homes in Hunters Hill She moved to Victoria and recorded the nineteenth-century slate-tiled warehouses of the St James Buildings, the demolition of the Eastern Markets and the construction of the King Street Bridge, the watch-tower of Melbourne’s fire station, and mud-brick buildings in Eltham. In 1952 George stayed for months in the outback of the Northern Territory, where her sister and her sister's husband were stationed at several reservations, and there photographed indigenous subjects for whom she developed great respect and love, including the Warlpiri people whom she described as among Australia's "most hardy and interesting aborigines", and others on the reserves, including school children at Areyonga Aboriginal Reserve, or working in cattle stations including Wave Hill. George shared her time between Melbourne and Sydney, and after 24 years based in Melbourne, settled in Paddington in the sixties, the suburb in which her grandfather Tom George was for many years an alderman and at one time Mayor. She continued to be a regular contributor of photographs for Walkabout, and many articles of the 60s feature her pictures of that suburb, of Woolloomooloo, Castlecrag, and of other features of Sydney, including Taronga Park Zoo, the Butler Stairs of Kings Cross, the multi-storied Chevron-Hilton hotel at Potts Point under construction, the emerging street cafés Macquarie Street, and the Mitchell Library. She travelled to Hobart for pictures of the Cat and Fiddle Square Her work also appeared in Hoofs and Horns, Pix, Women's Day, as well as the National Trust Magazine.