Hera Roberts

painter, illustrator, designer and commercial artist, was born in Dubbo in 1892, daughter of Robert I.A. and Nina I. Roberts. She is best known for her many Home magazine covers of the 1920s and '30s: flat, stylised images rendered with bold colour combinations. As an aspect of commercial art, she also arranged photo-spreads for the magazine featuring the fashionable new Art-Deco objects on sale in Sydney. Her cover for Home's 'Interior Decoration Number' of 1930 signalled other interests. It was self-consciously modernist, illustrating circular blonde-wood furnishings, a sheet-glass lamp base after French designer Djo-Bourgeois and a suitably modish woman. She designed a complete room, including chairs and cabinets, for the 1929 Burdekin House Exhibition. Similar pieces, often employing a ziggurat form with gloss painted finishes, were illustrated in the 1930s. Manar, the Macleay Street flat of her publisher and long-term companion Sydney Ure Smith, included designs by Roberts. She also designed at least one piece of furniture for the Stuart-Low Furniture Studio: a straight-sided writing desk in figured Queensland walnut with synthetic ivory pulls illustrated in Art and Australia (16 November 1936). After a trip to Europe in 1934 Roberts stated: 'In Sydney I think women would prefer to follow the English method in interior decoration rather than the Continental'.

Roberts was part of a large network of women involved with interior decoration. She was the student, and cousin, of Thea Proctor while another cousin, Mrs C. Dibbs (née Mary Proctor), conducted a country 'Shopping Club' which offered to undertake any kind of buying 'from furnishing a house to buying a piece of cherry ribbon'. The rise of this vocation signalled dissatisfaction with the products and services of trade outlets and the new decorator would be consulted as much for her distinctive taste as for the supply of products. The profession was reviewed enthusiastically in the Australian press as a suitable and lucrative job for women. Its connection with the home ensured its respectability, and it was argued that women held a natural advantage in the domestic sphere. These women were clearly 'ladies', spelled out in their glamorous appearances in the social Home and Society magazines, but they were also artists - a combination that considerably fuelled their credibility and appeal.

The December 1929 issue of Home carried a full-page advertisement for 'Kit Kat Powder - Society's Choice', comprising an elegant portrait of Roberts by the society photographer Harold Cazneaux and an accompanying 'interview' with the subject:

.she has such an amazing flair for and love of colour in dress. Often she might have just stepped from a Leon Bakst canvas. So it is no wonder the incomparable Pavlova, when she first saw Miss Roberts, exclaimed, "Ah! You are artiste, yes?"

This stylishness is evident as early as 1919 when Roberts was photographed by Monte Luke theatrically posed in fencing costume at the Sydney Swords' Club for Triad, which described her as 'one of the finest woman fencers in the Southern Hemisphere'. She also did designs for the theatre, including the costume designs for a production of Carlo Goldini's Mine Hostess at the Turret Theatre, Milsons Point (originals in the Mitchell Library). Roberts designed 'hats and frocks' for 'June', a millinery shop in Pitt Street she owned in partnership with Pauline Watt (see plate 240) and Jocelyn Gaden. In 1927 she was photographed by Cazneaux for Home in 'one of their vagabond felts'. As a modern interior decorator she enjoyed a significant profile and her comments on design were reported in the press as authoritative.

Roberts disappeared from the Sydney art scene after Ure Smith died in late 1949, so completely that Robert Holden believed she had died. In fact, she lived on for 20 years, marrying a solicitor, A.M. (Gus) Glen, in 1953. Hera Christian Glen died on 17 January 1969 (all reports say she committed suicide).

Peter McNeil, Joan Kerr.