 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
A Life by Design
By Siobhan O'Brien
Allen & Unwin $24.95
 Florence Broadhurst, now riding high on the wave of acclaim received by her Art Deco-inspired fabric designs, might have become even more famous if she had not meet an untimely and violent death in her Paddington wallpaper workshop at the age of 77.
As The Sydney Morning Herald enthused recently, the present-day owners of the Broadhurst wallpaper collection have released onto the market only 40 of her designs and with 'nearly 500 to come, the golden age of Broadhurst is just beginning.'
Born in 1899 on Mungy Station, a Queensland cattle property where there 'was no Shakespearean theatre or European boutiques for hundreds of thousands of acres,' Florence was a skilled rider and, as can be seen from a diary entry penned at 15, a girl of great ambition: 'I shall do great things... I will fall and in falling, climb.'
A talented singer and eisteddfod winner, she joined a musical drag act, the 'Smart Set Diggers', who, after Australian successes, were offered a tour of China.
In 1922 the 23-year-old Florence left for Shanghai, the 'Paris of the Orient', where 'opium dens, prostitution, gambling, extortion and violence were just part of the scenery'.
She became 'Bobby' Broadhurst, a singer, dancer and eventually proprietor of a culture academy, passing herself off as an Englishwoman: 'Not only did she sign up as an active member of the British Women's Association... but she maintained that she was British for the next fifty years.'
She left China because of civil war, made headlines in Queensland by rolling her father's new Studebaker and then moved to London, reinventing again to become 'Madam Pellier', a couturier running a leading salon.
In 1949 she returned to Sydney with second husband Leonard and young son Robert, embarking on a life as a painter, throwing herself into charity work and helping run her husband's trucking business.
Blending commercial skills with her design flair, she founded a wallpaper firm producing first 20, then hundreds of rolls a week. The patterns, strongly influenced by memories of Asia, made a major impact on the Sydney fashion scene.
Then Florence Broadhurst, whose work adorns the walls of top restaurants and stores in Sydney and London, was bludgeoned to death, a crime that has been reopened for investigation.
Apart from a few typos and a couple of bloopers (trams never ran up to Sydney's North Shore), her biographer, Sydney journalist Siobhan O'Brien, has served her well.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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