A Life By Design
To my flamboyant red-headed mother—
the original style queen.
First published in 2004
Copyright © Siobhan O’Brien 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 percent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
O’Brien, Siobhan, 1971- .
A life by design: the art and lives of Florence Broadhurst.
Bibliography.
ISBN 9781741143980
eISBN 9781741152364
1. Broadhurst, Florence. 1899-1977 - Bibliography. 2. Artists, Australian - Biography. I. Title.
700.920994
Set by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover photograph: From the collection held at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia
Cover design: Tabitha King and Zoë Sadokierski
Wallpaper background (a tribute to Florence Broadhurst's design style): Zoë Sadokierski
Foreword
A life by design is the first publication to visit and document in detail the fascinating and enigmatic life of Florence Broadhurst—singer, banjolele player, painter, business woman, mother and dress and wallpaper designer. I have been asked to comment on Florence’s significance as an Australian designer in the context of this biography. This provides a welcome opportunity to place Australian life and design in an international context.
In 1959, when she turned 60, Florence decided to buck the trend and established Australian (Hand Printed) Wallpapers (renamed Florence Broadhurst Wallpapers Ltd in 1969). From the mid 19th century, wallpaper had predominantly been imported to Australia from Britain, as well as from France, Canada and America. Although some effort was made at the beginning of the 20th century to manufacture papers in Australia (Morrison’s and Gilkes & Co.), few were produced and few survive today. It is Broadhurst’s successful wallpaper design and production venture, as well her reputation as a colourful Sydney personality with an A-list of prestigious clients, and her tragic death in 1977, for which Florence is best remembered today.
Since the late nineties, awareness of Florence Broadhurst’s significance has grown exponentially in Australia and overseas. Siobhan O’Brien’s article, ‘Mistress of the Rolls’, which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Weekend’ magazine in 1999, did much to revive curiosity and interest in Florence’s legacy, as has the development of the Broadhurst collection at the Powerhouse Museum, and the re-interpretation of Florence’s designs as fashion prints by cutting-edge Australian and New Zealand fashion designers. Feature articles on Broadhurst in Casa Vogue (Italy) and the International Herald Tribune (Paris) have also sparked international interest and appreciation in this Australian artist’s life and legacy.
Florence Broadhurst went from humble beginnings to lead a celebrity life, and through her extraordinary determination and charm won entree into ‘high society’. Although she was a Sydney personality, Florence Broadhurst was a private person shielding the details of her personal life as this biography and previous articles have revealed. Today, there are almost as many accounts and memories of Florence Broadhurst as there are wallpaper designs and, to some extent, specific details of Florence’s life remain unknown and continue to intrigue researchers and biographers, as well as family, friends and colleagues.
What is known, however, is that Florence had drive, vision and marketing acumen. Her tireless charity work, through which she established a loyal and influential clientele, her technology-driven approach to production, the deliberate pricing of her papers to compete with machine-made imports, her highly personalised service and her avoidance of wholesaling, provide keys to her business success. So do the merging of her life’s experiences, flamboyant personality and public confidence into a dynamic array of bold, colourful designs.
Sample books in the Powerhouse Museum’s collection contain an amazing range of colour combinations from Broadhurst’s favourite fuscia pinks through to classic seventies lime greens and vivid oranges to turquoise. Patterns with exotic titles proliferate: Oriental filigree, Japanese fans, Japanese floral, Japanese bamboo, Kabuki, Spanish scroll, Mexican daisy, Persian birds, Birds of Paradise, Large paisley, Florentine and Tudor tapestries. Her hallmark Peacocks design on silver foil is perceived as one of her best mature works—Florence had no hesitation in posing with it in one of her stylish advertisements.
Florence, one of Australia’s most prolific designers of wallpapers, which were in their day described as ‘Vigorous designs for modern living’, became part of a wave of post-World War II retailers, artists, designers and architects, including retailer Marion Hall Best, architect Harry Seidler, industrial designer Gordon Andrews and graphic designer Martin Sharp, who also printed on silver foil in the sixties. This group radically changed Australian attitudes toward design. In keeping with Florence’s own personality, her legacy doesn’t look like running out of steam soon—rather it appears to be rolling along, full steam ahead with her patterns and designs appearing in fashion, interior decorating and even advertising!
Anne-Marie Van de Ven
Curator, Decorative Arts and Design
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Contents
Foreword
Preface
1 Murder, 1977
2 Growing up, 1899–1922
3 The Orient, 1922–1927
4 Return home, 1927
5 London, 1927–1949
6 Sydney, 1949–1958
7 Wallpaper and trucking, 1959–1969
8 The final years, 1970–1977
Pic section
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Preface
My interest in Florence Broadhurst began in 1999 when I walked into Chee Soon & Fitzgerald, a diminutive but intriguing interior design shop on Crown Street in Sydney. At the time, I was cutting my teeth as a freelance journalist and just the day before a friend had mentioned in passing that the owners—Casey Khik and Brian Fitzgerald—were redistributing the wallpaper designs of an old woman who had been murdered in the seventies. He thought it might make a good story.
Usually one to be sceptical, I followed a hunch that this was a good lead. I can still remember walking into the shop for the first time: it was a veritable kaleidoscope of colour, filled with Marimekko prints, vintage glassware, shag pile rugs and bolts of vibrant fabric. I barely had time to introduce myself before I was perched on a stool out the back of the shop—a cup of tea in one hand and a Florence Broadhurst sample book in the other. It took a few minutes but I had fallen hopelessly in love.
It was this chance meeting with her wallpaper that led to a full-blown obsession with making sense of Florence Broadhurst’s life. I also hoped to reinvigorate interest in her designs and help—at least in some small way—to solve her murder.
I remember feeling (and still feel) driven by a strong sense of injustice for a number of reasons. Firstly,
Florence had played a major part in the history of Australian interior design and her contribution had never been fully and formally recognised until recently. And secondly, Florence had died in such a senseless, horrific way. The day that Florence Broadhurst was murdered in her Paddington studio-factory in 1977, the memory of her flamboyant life and her contribution to society had simply been discarded. But to me, Florence Broadhurst was not dead—she was just waiting to be rediscovered.
Armed with the information that Casey and Brian could offer me, I set out on a quest to track down family members, talk to the police from the homicide squad who had worked on her case in the seventies, and interview ex-employees, friends, lovers, acquaintances, business associates and neighbours. It did not take long for the jigsaw pieces of her life to come together. I would talk to someone who knew Florence; they’d pass on a telephone number or an address of someone else who knew her and before long I had a telephone book full of Broadhurst enthusiasts. It was the unlikeliest list: a junky that lived in a decrepit rented flat in Kings Cross; an old bloke who fixed pianos for a living; another whose local pub had been The Four in Hand in Darlinghurst for the past twenty years; interior designers who had been offering their services for as long as I had been alive; retired detectives from the homicide squad who recalled the case as if it had happened yesterday; Double Bay retailers; aging television personalities and Florence’s son Robert whose hair (according to his wife Annie) went grey in the week following his mother’s death.
The next thing I knew, Florence’s world started to overlap mine. I met friends of friends who’d known her and even discovered that I had grown up in a house papered with her designs. After looking at Belle and Vogue Living magazines, which had featured my childhood home, I discovered the powder room was emblazoned with one of Florence’s most complex wallpaper designs—Peacocks. The life-sized exotic birds were displayed on a metallic background and I remember staring up at the wallpaper as a child, counting the feathers and marvelling at the shimmering print designed in a wild array of coppers, silvers and earthy tones. Florence’s wallpapers provided the perfect match to the rest of the home that my mother had lovingly decorated in high-seventies style: brown suede walls, mottled marble vanities, soft cedar panelling and Italian pendant lights.
A few years after starting my investigation, my journey turned into a pilgrimage. With my father and six-month-old daughter Evie I explored the Queensland cattle station where Florence was born, paid homage to Broadhurst family graves, dined in her family home and drove to Hervey Bay where her ancestors had arrived in the 1860s. Eventually I ended up at the North Ryde Crematorium in Sydney where I sprinkled rose petals on her memorial.
In June 1999 I had an article published on Florence in the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Weekend’ magazine. Later the same year I penned a host of articles on Florence for Vogue Living, the Australian, Marie Claire Lifestyle, Australian Style and Monument. Very little had been published on her life and work since her murder in 1977 and many of her contemporaries had died. With such a character as Florence, separating legend (created by herself and others) from fact was a detective job in itself.
A life by design is the story of Florence Broadhurst’s life and a legacy of her work.
Siobhan O’Brien
September 2004
MURDER
1977
‘My success is the fact that my wallpapers have now become a status symbol.’
FLORENCE BROADHURST, PERSONALISATION PAYS OFF, SPEECH 1976
It was just after the close of business on Saturday, 15 October 1977, when Florence Maud Broadhurst cast an eye over her studio-factory on Royalston Street in Sydney’s Paddington. Since arriving at 8.45 am, the studio had been a hive of activity: employees washing print-screens, mixing paint, checking colours and drawing designs before printing them on the fourteen-metre-long tables that filled the lower level of the factory. The telephone had not stopped ringing throughout the day and a constant stream of clients added to the chaos—three of them were still rifling through the shelves bursting with 6000 designs in Florence’s upstairs office. Most of her employees had left for the day, but her head printer, David Bond, and Albert Roberts, a cleaner and silk-screen printer, were wiping shelves and sweeping the ink-splattered floor. From nearby Trumper Park, children’s cries could be heard as they kicked a football.
It had been one of Florence’s typically savvy business decisions to move the factory to the fashionable Sydney suburb of Paddington from the more industrial Crows Nest. She could have done it sooner than 1969. Paddington was a cosmopolitan suburb and Florence felt more in touch there with ‘her people’ as she liked to call her clients, friends and acquaintances—those who were attracted to the heady world of art, design and fashion. Since the early sixties, Paddington had morphed into a hot-spot for middle-class Bohemians and left-wing idealists. It was multicultural, full of suburban escapees, with streets lined with boutiques, showrooms, galleries, wine bars and delicatessens run by Greeks and Italians still doing brisk business late into the evening. Artists such as Margaret Olley, Donald Friend and Jeffrey Smart were also attracted to the buzz and culture of the area, while the Hungry Horse Gallery and Restaurant provided a venue for artists like Brett Whiteley, Robert Hughes, John Olsen, Robert Klippel and Clement Meadmore. Writers such as Mungo MacCallum, Cyril Pearl and Annette Macarthur-Onslow were also working behind the doors of smart thirties terrace houses, where fancy dress parties and partner swapping was the norm.
The façade of Florence’s studio-factory didn’t look much from the street. All that differentiated it from the brick terraces and factory buildings that surrounded it was a colourful awning with a scalloped edge that sat like a hood above the main front door. The design on the awning was printed by Nerida Greenwood, an employee of Florence’s between 1967 and 1970, and featured large, bold flowers on a plain white background. On either side of the front door large black plaques read ‘Florence Broadhurst. London–New York–Hawaii’. Underneath each of these plaques camellias that matched the colour of the building stood in large white pots. Other than these minor embellishments, the studio-factory was just a two-storey cement-block building with a saw-tooth roof. Inside, it was something else altogether.
•
Florence had come a long way in the twenty years since she set up her wallpaper business in 1959. Little did she know back then that designing, printing and producing custom-designed wallpaper would be so profitable and so fun. Not only was she now well established socially and financially, she had a loyal and influential clientele, she exported her wallpapers to London, New York, Hawaii, Paris, Kuwait, Madrid and Oslo, and had secured prestigious international commissions. According to fashion writer and former model Maggie Tabberer, ‘Anyone who was anyone decorated their homes with one of her designs.’
Even though the ‘indefatigable Churchillian dynamo’, as her ex-husband Leonard Lloyd Lewis called her, was seventy-eight years old by this time, she still walked to work every morning from her nearby home at Belgravia Gardens, Darling Point. And when she wasn’t walking, she was catching taxis to a relentless round of charity and social functions. Leslie Walford, an interior designer who knew Florence for twenty years, remembers her as ‘a dynamic, determined character who worked very, very hard’. According to Florence, ‘There is no substitute for hard work, whether you are an artist or in business…you must get down to an exacting schedule and fulfil your obligations. You have to work hard to be successful’ (Thompson, 1971). As she noted in her diary while living in London in the thirties: ‘The difference between stepping-stones and stumbling blocks is how you use them.’
Florence retained the bird-like beauty of her youth even into her late seventies. According to ex-husband Leonard in an interview in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1977, ‘People disbelieved her age. She hoodwinked them for years. Most felt she was around eighteen years younger than she was. Few knew she was really seventy-eight.’ But the vigour and healthy appearance was a
mask for Florence’s failing health. She was hard of hearing and nearly blind from the cataracts creeping over her eyes. Her inability to see well in her old age may have contributed to her passion for exaggerated colours—lime green, hot pink, bright sapphire blue, fluorescent yellow, gold, bronze and copper.
During the seventies Florence’s natural good looks had been replaced with glitzy artifice. She now donned wigs, had facelifts, fluttered false eyelashes, pancaked her makeup and wore large gold earrings that, combined with strategically coiffed red hair, hid her hearing aids. Exemployee Nerida Greenwood claims Florence often called on her workers to ‘run repairs’, which meant help her stick her eyelashes back on if they had come adrift or to rouge her cheeks where the makeup had rubbed off. Florence’s sister Priscilla once remarked, ‘If she has another facelift she won’t have any eyebrows left.’
•
On Saturday, 15 October 1977, the morning of her murder, Florence had walked to work along her usual route past cafés, corner stores and newspaper stands as cars, buses and trams rattled past. She wore her usual pant-suit but with an unusually sedate cream blouse and black cardigan. She had entertained some clients in her showroom on the previous evening—one of her many spontaneous parties that were often favourably reported in the press. When she arrived at the studio-factory she had a chat with David Bond and Albert Roberts, who were busy printing wallpaper on the lower level. About an hour later, Florence retreated to the upstairs showroom where she cleaned up, did some bookwork, made a few phone calls and waited for a barrage of clients.