Author(s): Marion Von Adlerstein

Australian

Early sixties in Sydney. Women wear princess-line dresses, edge-to-edge duster coats, gloves, perfectly matched handbags and shoes and seamed stockings. They are defined by the vital statistics of their bust, waist and hip measurements and if they are over thirty they re over the hill. Kings Cross is bohemian, Paddington is pre-gentrified and the crowd at Beppi's and the Ozone charge their boozy lunches to job numbers. At the advertising agency Bofinger Adams Rawson & Keane, two talented women hold important creative roles. One, Bea, is a copywriter. The other, Desi, is a television producer. Because they are successful in their work and rewarded by it, few of their colleagues know how adept they are at mismanaging their private lives. Anxious to join this starred twosome is a young secretary named Stella, who embodies all the qualities for success ambition, dedication, energy, efficiency except creative talent. In its absence she relies on stealth, flattery and plagiarism, to walk, in her Jane Debster toe-peepers, all over the others in realising her ambition. She succeeds. At least, for a while ...