When Jenny Kee first set eyes on Linda Jackson, she recalls it as creative love at first sight. That encounter happened in 1973 at a gallery in Sydney, a moment when Kee had been told she "had to meet an extraordinary Melbourne woman called Linda". Jackson remembers the moment differently but with equal certainty: "People kept saying to me, 'You have to meet Jenny' ... And they were right; when I first met her I just thought, 'That's Jenny, that's her.' It was like I'd been waiting for her."
The meeting triggered what would become one of Australian fashion's most transformative creative partnerships. Jackson and Kee describe their connection as "a creative version of a first love, a union so passionate it was almost like an affair." Within months, Kee opened Flamingo Park in the Strand Arcade, Sydney on 27 August 1973, with turquoise walls and shocking pink carpet and a notice inviting visitors to 'Step into Paradise'. Kee recalls the early space: "With Linda's unusual clothes and other pieces I collected from London, it was really a mix. We had cushions, crocheted items, flamingos and reggae music blasting out of an apple green jukebox. It was very kitsch, but romantic. Six months later, in April 1974, my knits went into the store and I have never looked back."
The pair shared a mutual love for the Australian environment and vintage clothing, developing a distinct voice in fashion through their inventive garments and bold prints. Their creations were entirely their own, independent of the conventional marketplace and fashion trends. From the outset, their designs were distinct in their bold use of Australian motifs and iconography: a blue linen suit appliqued with the sails of the Sydney Opera House; a silk chiffon slip decorated with hand-painted tropical fish; the Scribbly Gum tunic shedding strips of silk bark; or chunky, handknitted dresses and jumpers adorned with rosellas, koalas, waratahs and sprigs of wattle.
Together they hosted regular Flamingo Follies fashion shows that combined their designs with music and performance. In 1982, Princess Diana famously wore Kee's 'Koala' jumper to a polo game and in the same year, Karl Lagerfeld used her Opal fabric design in sixty-five garments for his first collection with Chanel, bringing Kee's work to international attention. Yet for all the celebrity and acclaim, the partnership operated on creative principles that resisted the machinery of commercial fashion. As Jackson reflected, they "weren't the type of people who wanted to have a big business. It was personal, the way we'd greet people, make friends with everyone."
In 1982 Kee and Jackson ended their formal partnership, and Flamingo Park closed in 1995. The separation marked a professional transition, not a rupture. Jackson embarked on a nomadic existence, collaborating with Indigenous Australian women artists at Utopia Station in the Northern Territory to produce textiles and garments that drew on their artistic traditions. She later recalled: 'I loved watching the artists sitting around the fire, creating their batiks, marking their stories onto silk and cotton. The batik technique seemed to suit the heat and red dust of the desert. Meeting these women in their place made my heart sing!'
Kee and Jackson's friendship continues today and both have found success in independent projects. In 2019 and 2020, major retrospective exhibitions celebrated their work at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. More recently, two of Australia's best known fashion icons were at the National Gallery of Australia to celebrate a special acquisition of 80 fashion items from Kee and Jackson's personal archives, with this wonderful acquisition being the largest collection of work by both designers held in a public institution.
What endures across five decades is not just memory of a shared past, but a continuing creative dialogue. Both speak of their meeting as "the actual meeting of two females with the same passion, the same love". When they speak now, they finish each other's sentences and reference private jokes from the 1970s with the ease of people who inhabit the same creative language. It is the kind of friendship that does not require constant reinforcement; it simply continues, an undercurrent beneath their separate professional lives.