The writing also forced her to go back to her childhood in Watson's Creek, a farming community in New South Wales, where she was raised by her mother and grandparents. She had no real contact with her father until she learned in her sixties that he was a deluded playboy who had seduced her mother without telling her he was married. He had at least two other daughters outside his marriage. The shame made Dally-Watkins' mother push her daughter into the glamorous career she felt she had been denied. But at the end of her working life, Dally-Watkins struggled with depression as she looked back at her international fame.

Decades before anyone spoke of feminism, she had run her businesses as a single mother of four. Women ridiculed her for not devoting enough time to her husband and predicted her children would become delinquents.

'I remember when my father-in-law patted my husband on the shoulder and said, 'Don't worry, son. As soon as the children start coming, she'll give up the business.' I thought, 'No way. I'm going to have my own life.' I always felt that a woman should have her own life. I never stopped dreaming and planning.'

But she fitted in no better when women started asking for more rights. She became part of the problem. The world knew her as Miss Dally, doyenne of old-fashioned grooming, deportment and elocution as a means for women to make husbands look good.

In the 1970s, she was parodied on national television as Jane Dilly Popkins. Two decades later, Sydney's

Gay and Lesbian Mardis Gras parade included a float called the June Dally-Watkins Rejects. Women wore sashes and hats shaped as stacks of books while carrying pictures of her wearing a moustache.

She overcame the depression and gave her children control of the businesses while she devoted herself to the Hong Kong charity Crossroads, which sends aid around the world. As ambassador-at-large for Crossroads, she personally delivered aid to Croatia and Russia. She convinced Dragon Air to help the charity fly goods and resources to the mainland.

The book, she says, represented the peace she had found with herself. She came to Hong Kong with the last 100 of the 15,000 hardback copies that had been printed in Australia. The new focus she had found would be confirmed by Hong Kong, which she has visited about three times a year since 1961 for fashion shows and training programmes.

'I thought the most wonderful thing that could happen to me now would be to see my book in the window of the book shop at the Star Ferry,' she says. 'It's only been Dymocks for a short time. I've been going to the book shop at the ferry since I first came to Hong Kong.

'To see my book in the window, my life would have done a full circle.'

After stopping at the Mandarin to fix her hair and lipstick, maintaining the grace she passed on to 300,000 students, she asked the book store manager to buy just one copy of her title and briefly sit it in the window.

The manager could have been excused for interpreting it as the ploy of a business women trained to get her way with modest charm. But when she agreed to put it in the window, the revered composure of Miss Dally dissolved suddenly into tears.

The embarrassed manager pledged to buy more copies, but Dally-Watkins was still crying. She returned to the Mandarin for coffee and another go at her makeup.

'Then a confused waitress asked me why I was laughing and crying at the same time,' she says, as tears once again start welling. 'I didn't know how to explain how amazing it was to have my book in that shop. It's still there, next to Bill Clinton.'

She has been back in Hong Kong for most of this month to prepare for today's launch of the Secrets paperback edition.

Sitting rigidly upright with a delicate hold of her coffee cup, Dally-Watkins shows no sign that she's been sleeping in a rough room at Crossroads' base in the old Gurkha camp at Castle Peak Road, Tuen Mun.

She is co-ordinating programmes her Business Finishing College runs in Singapore and New Delhi. And she operates schools for models and business people in Brisbane and Sydney, with a third set to open in Perth. A six-week programme is planned for Hong Kong in November.

The business colleges are the modern equivalent of the finishing schools she once ran for aspiring models, secretaries and housewives.

A deportment school that property magnate Cecil Chao Sze-tsung urged her to open in Hong Kong failed in the mid-80s. Dally-Watkins says her mistake was to base the school in Central when most of her students were in Kowloon.

But the pace of international trade has created a need for people from different cultures to understand each other.

The men and women studying under her wear a uniform, to prevent them relying on Prada handbags for personal image. Over the years they have studied fine wine and food appreciation, grooming and makeup, as well as ethics, banking and record-keeping.

Today's models could use some of her training, she says, but admits she no longer belongs in an industry that encourages women 'to saunter on to catwalks with arms dropping from hunched shoulders and heads falling forward and a strange gait called 'pony walk' ... They wear little else besides a vacant expression.

'People are becoming very unattractive in their mannerisms. They're not caring about each other. They're not showing respect. There are very few role models. So, everything we teach could have been configured about 15 years ago as old-fashioned.

'Now, everybody wants it.'

June Dally-Watkins will sign copies of her book at Dymocks, Prince's Building, Central, from 12.30pm today