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What Will Be Worn: a McWhirters story
Sometimes it seems the most invaluable stories can be found in the unlikeliest of corners.
McWhirters, a once celebrated department store in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, is an icon. For Melissa Fagan it is also the starting point for this remarkable exploration of her mother, and grandmother’s, lives, and a poignant reminder of the ways in which retail stores and fashion have connected women’s lives across decades.
Behind the dusty shop counters of an Art Deco treasure, Fagan discovers both what has been lost and continues to shine. Ultimately this tender exploration of self and family, so exquisitely written, speaks of the ways in which life so often surprises us and of how the legacies of others can truly enrich our own relationships and lives.
McWhirters, a once celebrated department store in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley, is an icon. For Melissa Fagan it is also the starting point for this remarkable exploration of her mother, and grandmother’s, lives, and a poignant reminder of the ways in which retail stores and fashion have connected women’s lives across decades.
Behind the dusty shop counters of an Art Deco treasure, Fagan discovers both what has been lost and continues to shine. Ultimately this tender exploration of self and family, so exquisitely written, speaks of the ways in which life so often surprises us and of how the legacies of others can truly enrich our own relationships and lives.
288 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2018
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51 people want to read
About the author
Melissa Fagan
6 books10 followersMelissa Fagan is an Australian writer and editor who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Bundjalung nation in Northern NSW. Her fiction and nonfiction has been published in Overland, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, QWeekend and others. She also teaches and lectures in creative writing courses at a number of universities.
In 2018 she started a practice-led PhD in travel writing with Curtin University and the University of Aberdeen.
What Will Be Worn is her first book.
In 2018 she started a practice-led PhD in travel writing with Curtin University and the University of Aberdeen.
What Will Be Worn is her first book.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
August 21, 2018
Memoir is a slippery beast, necessarily reliant on the perspective of the one telling the story, and forged by memories and recollections that are individual and personal, and therefore by their very nature destined to be only one person’s account of a collective experience. In Melissa Fagan’s book What Will Be Worn (Transit Lounge 2018), she has delved deep into her own store of memories, she has interviewed or chatted with dozens of relatives and family friends, and she has combined these stories with painstaking research – everything from newspaper articles and wills to divorce court decrees, bills of sale and old correspondence. The result is a compelling and highly readable history of McWhirters, both the family – her family – and the famous department store in Fortitude Valley. The McWhirters building is an iconic Brisbane landmark and for Fagan it is a touchstone throughout this book as she investigates her family’s heritage and history, her forebears’ foibles, failings, successes and triumphs, and weaves it all together into a fascinating exploration of their lives. She focuses particularly on the women – her mother, her grandmother, and those before them, and she describes their inextricable links with fashion, retail shopping, horse-racing and more, as she tries to trace the story of her beginnings. She explores the choices made, the financial and social decisions, the failures of family and of business, in her attempt to track backwards from her own life to her past. And while she reaches as far back as she can go – back to her Scottish ancestry – she continually intersperses these found facts with moments from her current life, and contemporary circumstances.
While the McWhirters building might now be a fading and crumbling star, and while Fagan has gathered much of her information from the dusty archives of years past, her story is not old-fashioned or fusty. It is a funny, engaging and moving story peopled with quirky characters who lead lives that could come straight out of a movie, or at least out of the social pages. In the foreword, she talks about her grandfather who gambled away his inheritance and her grandmother who had an affair; about wealth, fortunes and reputations made and lost. She attempts to piece together the patterns that run through this family, and she thinks carefully about the legacy that is left behind, not only the physical and historical legacy, but the emotional legacy – the complicated warp and weft of a family’s story. This is a brave book, because it digs deep, picking the scabs off old wounds and excoriating scar tissue to find out what lies beneath. It is brave because in it Fagan confronts not only her own prejudices and idiosyncrasies and uncertainties, but because she confronts the superficial narrative of her family story, the tale that has been held up as the truth, and she challenges that ‘truth’ to try to find out whether other – alternative – stories might also be true. She investigates ‘facts’ and discovers fabrication, she gently presses the façade of respectability and finds scandal and impropriety, she takes well-worn family lore and uses her investigative skills to get at the real story behind the story.
Writing memoir about family members who have died is hard enough, but encapsulating those who are still living – attempting to portray an honest tale whilst being respectful of other family members and their memories – is a very fine line upon which to balance. Fagan steps across this tightrope with care and sensitivity, always mindful of people’s feelings and (perhaps different) perspectives, but never allowing that to deter her from seeking the facts. Sometimes those facts are unpalatable, but Fagan doesn’t retreat behind distance or time – she wades right in, while constantly reminding herself – and us, the reader – of her inherent biases and emotional attachments. With one eye on the story, and one on the effect of the story, she gives us a complex appraisal of her history and of the effect that history has had on her own life story.
With the inclusion of personal photographs and quotes from the newspapers and retail catalogues of the time, this book is an intimate entrée to the social and business life of one of Queensland’s founding families. A tale of young love and committed relationships, of financial risk-taking and empire building, of fashion and frocks, of drunkenness and adultery, of gambling and excess, and of the wealth of those in high society, this story joins the past and the present, and demonstrates how the ties of family can continue to bind people together despite extraordinary odds. If you are interested in fashion trends, shopping giants, Brisbane history, or simply the remarkable whims of chance, this book will entertain and delight. And if, like many people, you have nostalgic memories of days spent in the famous McWhirters building, this book will satisfy your curiosity about its establishment.
While the McWhirters building might now be a fading and crumbling star, and while Fagan has gathered much of her information from the dusty archives of years past, her story is not old-fashioned or fusty. It is a funny, engaging and moving story peopled with quirky characters who lead lives that could come straight out of a movie, or at least out of the social pages. In the foreword, she talks about her grandfather who gambled away his inheritance and her grandmother who had an affair; about wealth, fortunes and reputations made and lost. She attempts to piece together the patterns that run through this family, and she thinks carefully about the legacy that is left behind, not only the physical and historical legacy, but the emotional legacy – the complicated warp and weft of a family’s story. This is a brave book, because it digs deep, picking the scabs off old wounds and excoriating scar tissue to find out what lies beneath. It is brave because in it Fagan confronts not only her own prejudices and idiosyncrasies and uncertainties, but because she confronts the superficial narrative of her family story, the tale that has been held up as the truth, and she challenges that ‘truth’ to try to find out whether other – alternative – stories might also be true. She investigates ‘facts’ and discovers fabrication, she gently presses the façade of respectability and finds scandal and impropriety, she takes well-worn family lore and uses her investigative skills to get at the real story behind the story.
Writing memoir about family members who have died is hard enough, but encapsulating those who are still living – attempting to portray an honest tale whilst being respectful of other family members and their memories – is a very fine line upon which to balance. Fagan steps across this tightrope with care and sensitivity, always mindful of people’s feelings and (perhaps different) perspectives, but never allowing that to deter her from seeking the facts. Sometimes those facts are unpalatable, but Fagan doesn’t retreat behind distance or time – she wades right in, while constantly reminding herself – and us, the reader – of her inherent biases and emotional attachments. With one eye on the story, and one on the effect of the story, she gives us a complex appraisal of her history and of the effect that history has had on her own life story.
With the inclusion of personal photographs and quotes from the newspapers and retail catalogues of the time, this book is an intimate entrée to the social and business life of one of Queensland’s founding families. A tale of young love and committed relationships, of financial risk-taking and empire building, of fashion and frocks, of drunkenness and adultery, of gambling and excess, and of the wealth of those in high society, this story joins the past and the present, and demonstrates how the ties of family can continue to bind people together despite extraordinary odds. If you are interested in fashion trends, shopping giants, Brisbane history, or simply the remarkable whims of chance, this book will entertain and delight. And if, like many people, you have nostalgic memories of days spent in the famous McWhirters building, this book will satisfy your curiosity about its establishment.
August 21, 2020
Really fantastic social history of the McWhirters department store and McWhirter's family history in Brisbane. I knew little of this part of Brisbane's history and this book provided a personal, sensitive and interestiing account of the store and family's history. Very interesting book. Well written.
August 29, 2018
There is so much more to this book than meets the eye. In part, it is a narration of social history, focusing on one family and the legacy they built in the form of McWhirters, a once iconic department store in Brisbane. I loved this aspect of the book, social history being a big interest of mine. From humble beginnings, the McWhirter family, originally hailing from Scotland, can be traced via this meticulous account. However, this book is by no means a chronological history of the family and the department store, rather, it’s an exploration of self, within the context of one’s family history. Yes, there are facts and figures – which I found endlessly fascinating – but there are breaches in truth, creative leanings that give this memoir a certain whimsical quality that served to fill the gaps of history.
Melissa has a wonderfully lyrical way of writing, casting the reader back through time while always connecting the past with the present. It’s in this that the book presents its other self, as raw account of a family that has been fractured multiple times throughout the generations. The honesty was at times discomforting, and I can only admire Melissa in her bravery at putting much of this out there because not only does she tell the story of her family down through the generations, in all its unforgiving glory, she continually pulls it back to her own exploration of who she is, how she has been shaped, and where she wants to go from here. Personally, I prefer the layer of distance fiction affords, but I appreciated the intent of this memoir, and it was incredibly absorbing at times, even if it was more of an exploration of McWhirters the family and all of their drama than a social history on McWhirters the store.
I listened to a memory expert on the radio recently, and the whole discussion was around how unreliable our memories are. How in fact, many of our memories are false. False memories are incredibly easy to acquire and impossible to distinguish from actual memories. Melissa returns to this notion over and over, the unreliability of the memories of family members she spoke with, how her mother would remember something one way while her aunt would remember the same thing entirely different. The unreliability of her own memories. The challenge with a memoir is to perhaps not disguise this, but to own it, and work with it, which Melissa has done with success. Beautifully written, What Will Be Worn is a valuable contribution to Queensland’s documented history.
Thanks is extended to Transit Lounge for providing me with a copy of What Will Be Worn for review.
Melissa has a wonderfully lyrical way of writing, casting the reader back through time while always connecting the past with the present. It’s in this that the book presents its other self, as raw account of a family that has been fractured multiple times throughout the generations. The honesty was at times discomforting, and I can only admire Melissa in her bravery at putting much of this out there because not only does she tell the story of her family down through the generations, in all its unforgiving glory, she continually pulls it back to her own exploration of who she is, how she has been shaped, and where she wants to go from here. Personally, I prefer the layer of distance fiction affords, but I appreciated the intent of this memoir, and it was incredibly absorbing at times, even if it was more of an exploration of McWhirters the family and all of their drama than a social history on McWhirters the store.
I listened to a memory expert on the radio recently, and the whole discussion was around how unreliable our memories are. How in fact, many of our memories are false. False memories are incredibly easy to acquire and impossible to distinguish from actual memories. Melissa returns to this notion over and over, the unreliability of the memories of family members she spoke with, how her mother would remember something one way while her aunt would remember the same thing entirely different. The unreliability of her own memories. The challenge with a memoir is to perhaps not disguise this, but to own it, and work with it, which Melissa has done with success. Beautifully written, What Will Be Worn is a valuable contribution to Queensland’s documented history.
Thanks is extended to Transit Lounge for providing me with a copy of What Will Be Worn for review.
October 4, 2018
What Will be Worn is a personal memoir of living under the famous hoarding of the McWhirter name. Melissa Fagan's grandfather was once one of the most eligible bachelors in Brisbane, but lost his inheritance through gambling and other bad life choices. Melissa's mother Jill could still draw on the family's legacy enough to draw income for travels in the sixties; however, by the time Melissa came of age, she only had family myths and secrets, and questions of her identity. At one point, Melissa was a tour guide in SE Asia, and her memoir reflects her wandering eye.
The first stop for the reader along the journey is the famous McWhirters building in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, which she tells us is well-known to Brisbane-ites. As someone who has lived in Brisbane for 10 years, I don't know of the building, apart from the photographs in this memoir. I reflected on this and realised that after 10 years in one place, I have no stories inscribed in the landscape, no memories attached to street corners, or to buildings and dwellings. This is not the case for Melissa. This gorgeous memoir (with photos, which I always love) transverses Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and Sydney, structured around the memories, stories, and people associated with these places. In this way, Melissa stitches together her grandmother's, her mother's and her story.
Highly recommended, and not just for readers familiar with Brisbane landmarks, but for those with an interest in what gets passed down and recycled through generations.
The first stop for the reader along the journey is the famous McWhirters building in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, which she tells us is well-known to Brisbane-ites. As someone who has lived in Brisbane for 10 years, I don't know of the building, apart from the photographs in this memoir. I reflected on this and realised that after 10 years in one place, I have no stories inscribed in the landscape, no memories attached to street corners, or to buildings and dwellings. This is not the case for Melissa. This gorgeous memoir (with photos, which I always love) transverses Brisbane, the Gold Coast, and Sydney, structured around the memories, stories, and people associated with these places. In this way, Melissa stitches together her grandmother's, her mother's and her story.
Highly recommended, and not just for readers familiar with Brisbane landmarks, but for those with an interest in what gets passed down and recycled through generations.
September 30, 2018
I, along with so many of my peers here in Australia, am a child of a migrant. Perhaps this is why we are so drawn to tales of industry and pioneering spirit — of people that packed up all their worldly possessions and left everything and everyone they ever knew behind in the hope of something better for themselves and their families; those daring enough to try their luck on foreign shores. Born and raised in Brisbane Australia, the names and locations featured in What Will Be Worn : A McWhirters Story are deeply familar to me.
Read full review >>
October 10, 2019
I reviewed this book for Westerly online:
https://westerlymag.com.au/what-will-...
https://westerlymag.com.au/what-will-...
August 17, 2020
What Will Be Worn is a beautifully written and honest portrayal of the McWhirter family legacy which reveals the inter-generational ripple effects that occur in families but the details for which often remain unknown. It is evident this novel has been thoroughly researched and over a vast period of time, from Scotland to Brisbane. Throughout, Melissa Fagan provides insight and compassion into the role of women in family, business, fashion and society and she has woven these insights to moments of her own life that has created a warm and relatable story for readers. I highly recommend What Will Be Worn!
August 17, 2020
Loved reading the backstory to a building that I remembered when my family moved to Brisbane so long ago. The McWhiters family story is similar to those of us who's relatives arrived back in the day from Scotland and Ireland. Yet the details for the McWhirters family story have been bought to life by Melissa Fagan's beautiful writing. I enjoyed it so much I had to buy a copy for my mum. She loved it too!
September 29, 2018
Loved this book. Took me back to when I was little every Christmas holidays we would catch the train from Ipswich to the Valley just to go to McWhirters just to see Santa.
February 19, 2019
A beautifully-written treasure box of a book. And a wonderful example of the pleasure and surprise of good creative non-fiction. Delving into the backstory of Brisbane's iconic McWhirters building, which Fagan has a personal connection to, reveals so much more - an intriguing family, a city in transformation, a snapshot into a particular time in Australia's history, all lightly stitched with Fagan's own search for self.
August 16, 2020
I loved this!
Especialy the history of fashion and the beautifuly written story
Definately a book you should read in your lifetime.
Especialy the history of fashion and the beautifuly written story
Definately a book you should read in your lifetime.
December 30, 2018
I was enamored by the McWhirter story and Melissa's personal recollections of her complex family history. Lovers of local history, fashion, architecture, business and travel may all find something to take home from this story. Having grown up in South East Queensland, I was familiar with many of the locations, particularly of the Gympie and Sunshine Coast region. Authentic memoir is tricky to carry off and I think the author skirted the between-zones of truth and fable, known and unknown, with honesty and clarity. Every aspect of this book may not appeal to every person, but there will be something for everyone within its compact format.
January 21, 2021
More than just an account of a once iconic Brisbane department store, this book is also an unflinchingly honest cultural and social catalogue of a family's obsessions, successes and failures in business and in life.
March 29, 2019
Found this book very disjointed
July 22, 2021
This book will appeal to Brisbane-ites of a certain generation.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews