Christine WaringDesigner Millinery

Christine Waring left a job as a secretary at the Australian National University to train in millinery, part-time, at Canberra's technical college, and started her own business in 1988. She has been making hats from an inner-city Ainslie studio ever since. Her client list runs from Canberra brides and race-day regulars to Government House — she has made hats worn by Marlena Jeffery, wife of the then Governor-General Michael Jeffery, former ACT chief minister Kate Carnell, and Senator Kate Lundy. The National Museum of Australia recorded her for its Landmark Women oral history series, and the Canberra Times has returned to her workroom more than once across a career now past three decades, including a piece on a hat she made for novelist Marion Halligan's fictional milliner character, Tracey Lord. Waring also teaches millinery at CIT, the same college where she trained. Commissions are made to order and by appointment, timed around Canberra's calendar of race days, weddings and official functions that keep a milliner's books full in the capital.