Iconic Australian fashion designer Alannah Hill reveals the tragic backstory to her glamourous life in “Butterfly on a Pin”, her topselling autobiography published by Hardie Grant, ($33). Words: Janice Breen Burns
This story first appeared in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald
I’ve heard scraps of fashion icon Alannah Hill’s backstory for 20-odd years. Little shocks dropped into otherwise innocuous chats. “Mum’d threw us chop bones to play with…”, “I was a broken girl…”, “Something happened….”. But she’d skim on, leaving listeners puzzled; did I hear right? Was that real or just another jig-saw bit of her fantastic perpetual-girl/broken-doll hybrid of a public persona?
This was, after all, THE Alannah Hill, world famous designer, as renowned for her pretty melodramas and naughtynice witticisms as her marvellous clothes. So beloved was she by her target market, many mimicked her pale, cherry-lipped look, flower-studded pile of raven hair, swishy floral frocklets and skittery high heels. The Alannah army.
Hill was also the fabulous eccentric who swam fully clothed (careful coiff, makeup and petticoats included; not your average Aussie beach babe), who packed a ballgown and perfume into her birthing suite essentials dilly bag, and who once joked (accidentally, but to a brace of delightedly gobsmacked gossip reporters) that she wouldn’t have said no to the amorous advances of a certain notorious corporate sexual harrasser had he only asked. (Yes, it was the catalyst atop one particularly slippery slope in her undulating career.)
So, you see how it was. Hill’s mad little conversational bomblets hinting at a bleaker life-before-fame in Tasmania, easily dissolved into the ether outside of her official (read; more fashionable) “Once Upon a Time” story.
That one began the day her 16 year old self and eight suitcases full of op-shopped and homemade frocks (some sewn from garbage bags) were tipped out of a taxi onto Chapel Street, South Yarra, in 1979. Her Tasmanian childhood, including ruefully selling Samboy chips and Choo Choo bars in a dusty Penguin milkbar behind which she lived with her brothers and sister, chronically dissappointed father and “spectacularly negative” mother, were a quick undercoat, minus the sad and bad bits.
But now.
Hill’s memoir, Butterfly on a Pin (Hardie Grant, and an apter title I can’t imagine) joins the dots and scraps and crystalises them in a story she obviously longed to tell and which is unlike any other you’re likely to read.
And it’s bleak, yes, horrifying, but funny at times too. Hill’s raw intelligence and “dark, absurd, slightly berserk sense of humor” (a trait she attributes to her mother) blend in prose that chops from free-rangingly florid, to astonishingly simple, beautiful and poetic. “I am a bathtub without a plug…,” she tells one boyfriend. “I felt her trying to love me…” she observes of her complicated mother. “I love to sweep,” she writes of her favorite soother, “….sweeping away the broken parts of me as they fall…”
Only her several encounters with awful men, including assaults when she was a child and a particularly brutal rape by two policemen, are dispatched less poetically.
Hill deep-dives unembarassedly into her own psyche as she copes, ever effervescent, by evolving a hybrid self; “good Alannah”, her own intensely feminine masterpiece of fashion, makeup and self-effacing wit we know and love on one side, and her “mongrel self”, the Alannah born to the complicated, restless, Hill family on the other.
Lesser mortals would buckle under the same backstory but Hill literally ran, danced, roller-skated or worked her way out of the dark. In the golden years of Melbourne’s punk, arts and fashion scenes in the 1980s, 90s and 00s, she looped her struggle for normality and love with a roller-coaster career. It makes for a ripping, inspirational yarn, this story she’s waited so long to tell.
