ABSTRACT
This chapter emerges from a larger biographical project investigating Betty Stewart's six-decade career in public relations in Australia. It introduces Stewart and briefly outlines her career, which began in theatres in the early 1930s. The chapter investigates the promotion of Oriental Cavalcade, a show that featured performers from various countries in Asia alongside English, American and Australian performers. This investigation enables insights into routine public relations work in the entertainment sector at that time. The chapter considers the significance of Stewart’s promotional strategy for Oriental Cavalcade, focusing on Orientalist and ‘exotic Asian’ tropes. To conclude, it identifies the factors contributing to the exclusion of certain kinds of public relations work, such as entertainment public relations, from gendered professional conceptualisations of the field. Bollen describes how the imagery used in much of the marketing of Oriental Cavalcade ‘recycled the eroticised tropes of Orientalism’, with confusing harem scenes and near naked women.
