The Women in Black

Sydney in the late 1950s. In Cocktail Frocks, on the second floor of the famous Goode's Department Store, the women in black are girding themselves for the Christmas rush. Lisa is the new Sales Assistance (Temporary). Across the floor and beyond the arch, she is about to meet the glamorous Continental refugee, Magda, guardian of the rose-pink cave of Model Gowns. Madeleine St John, a modern-day Jane Austen, conjures a vanished summer of innocence with the lightest touch and tenderest of comic instincts.