CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Australians who know better are today on their very best manners, as the nation pays tribute to former model and deportment icon June Dally-Watkins, who has died in Sydney yesterday aged 92.
Dally-Watkins was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to business in 1993, in her work teaching thousands of working class and rural Australians which cutlery is for which, how to use the queen’s english when mixing with the elites – just like in ‘pretty woman’.
In 1950, she established the June Dally-Watkins school, which trained young Australian women in deportment and etiquette – this program eventually came to include men, when society finally came round to the idea that men should also make an effort in public as well.
Dally-Watkins is also remembered as a latent feminist icon, and was was the first woman in New South Wales to own a drivers license.
Today, in tribute to the pioneer of table manners and public decorum, Australians are making an extra effort to keep their elbows off the table.
Women are making sure to not be seen eating in public, and male pedestrians are ensuring that they walk on the curb-side of the women they are courting.
It is believed that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of regional grandmothers are distraught today – and not even a muggacino and scratchie will be able to cheer them up.
Vale, June Dally-Watkins. OAM (13 June 1927 – 22 February 2020.
