Helen ONeil - Florence Broadhurst

HER SECRET &
EXTRAORDINARY
LIVES

HELEN ONEILL

Published in 2011 by Hardie Grant Books

Hardie Grant Books (Australia)
85 High Street
Prahran, Victoria 3181
www.hardiegrant.com.au

Hardie Grant Books (UK)
Second Floor, North Suite
Dudley House
Southampton Street
London WC2E 7HF
www.hardiegrant.co.uk

Publisher: Paul McNally
Project editor: Gordana Trifunovic
Design concept: Gayna Murphy
Designer: Steve Smedley, Tonto Design
Colour reproduction by Splitting Image Colour Studio
Printed and bound in China by C & C Offset Printing Co. LTD.

This edition printed in 2011. First published in Australia in 2006

Copyright text Helen ONeill 2011
Copyright Florence Broadhurst designs R.L.L. Pty Ltd
For all image copyright details, see

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: ONeill, H. (Helen).
Florence Broadhurst : Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives.
ISBN 978 1 74270 0 595 (hbk.)
1. Broadhurst, Florence, 18991977. 2. Artists, Australian Biography.
3. Businesswomen Australia Biography. 700.92

The publisher would like to thank Signature Prints for the use of Florence Broadhursts designs and images throughout the book.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE
Stepping out onto the stage

CHAPTER TWO
Role play

CHAPTER THREE
The designer decades

CHAPTER FOUR
Backstage: the Broadhurst factory

CHAPTER FIVE
The last act

CHAPTER SIX
Unexpected encore

CHAPTER SEVEN
The butterfly effect

CHAPTER EIGHT
Curtain call

Exotic Birds an elaborate design made using five different silk screens. Each of the peacocks is one metre tall.

There is a fantastic lightness of being about Florence Broadhurst about the lives she led, the loves she turned her back on and the legacies she left.

The most striking of those legacies is the Florence Broadhurst design library, an extraordinary collection of 530 hand-drawn patterns that originally made their mark in Australia as expensive, hand-printed, silk-screen wallpapers.

At first glance, the artistic and stylistic range of these patterns is astounding. They bound from intricate English tapestries to boastfully abstract geometrics, romantic florals, psychedelic pop art, dynamic orientals and witty, cartoon-like line drawings.

Of the entire range, one of the most arresting, stand-alone images is the luminous, utopian creation Exotic Birds. What makes Exotic Birds remarkable is not its size, although at almost a metre from tip to feathered tail the design dwarfs most of the other Broadhurst creations. It is that this artful, apparently simple image is created by pressing paint through five handcrafted silk-screens. Taken out of context, the pattern held on each of these five screens means nothing a series of sweeping abstract, art deco curves sits on one; artfully drawn petals floating precariously in mid-air make up another; a third holds seamless, dynamic strokes that frustratingly leave skeletal outlines rather than any real guide as to what the finished image will be. Only when the five seemingly unrelated silk-screens are brought together, when layers of different-coloured inks are accurately applied through each, will the complete picture emerge.

This portrait of Florence Broadhurst takes the same approach; perhaps the only one possible with a woman who lived as she did, inventing different lives on different continents, tailoring her name and her history for each one. She carved her own bold passage through an era of enormous social upheaval, stepping into each new life as though it was a new theatrical role. She employed a different regimen of hair, make-up and clothing for each one. As the photographs from her familys archives show, Florence Broadhurst quite literally changed with the times.

At the age of sixty, following a series of secret lives, Florence Broadhurst declared that Australia was afraid of colour and publicly launched herself as a designer. She founded a high-class, hand-print wallpaper design studio in Sydney and over the following two decades became outrageously prolific, producing images that found their way from Australia to London, New York and Saudi Arabia.

On 15 October 1977, the creative hurricane suddenly came to an end when Florence Broadhurst was murdered in her Paddington wallpaper showroom. The attack was ferocious and brutal, her fingers broken and her body battered. At first glance, the motive appeared to be robbery.

In the months that followed Florence Broadhursts death, homicide detectives sifted through evidence, witness statements, rumour and hearsay in an abortive attempt to solve the crime. As the years brushed by, Florence Broadhursts family and friends slowly emerged from the nightmarish horror of her murder and the police investigation that came with it, some more wounded than others by the knowledge that until her killer was convicted, no one could really trust any of the others again. Wild stories spread of her supposed links with figures from the criminal underworld.