Pod Insights ABC Rewind Florence: A life papered over – Part 1 About this episode She’s one of Australia’s most prolific and popular designers, and yet not many people know her name, let alone her audacious life story.
Florence Broadhurst was from regional Queensland but people who met her later in life, thought she was English aristocrat. She reinvented herself many times throughout her life.
Today she’s known for her wallpaper designs that cemented her in Australian design history.
But a shadow lingers over her legacy; her unsolved murder in 1977.
Guests:
Helen O’Neill – Journalist and author, Florence Broadhurst: Her secret and extraordinary lives Dr Andrew Field – Associate Professor of Chinese History, Duke Kunshan University Babette Hayes OAM – Interior designer David Lennie – Screen printer, Signature Prints Sheridan Black – Owner, Signature Handprints Tony Russell – Former NSW Police officer David Lloyd-Lewis – Grandson of Florence Broadhurst Laura Doble – Interior design graduateCredits:
Producer – Zoe Ferguson Engineer – Simon Branthwaite Executive Producer – Michelle Rayner
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:10 Speaker 01 She's one of Australia's most prolific and popular designers and yet not many people know her name, let alone the story of her audacious life. Florence Broadhurst grew up in regional Queensland, but those who met her later in life thought she was English and an aristocrat. She reinvented herself many times throughout her life.
0:33 Speaker 02 Just how fabulous was her past?
0:36 Speaker 03 There were times when she made up some interesting stories.
0:39 Speaker 04 But who was the real Florence Broadhurst?
0:41 Speaker 03 Florence's story is a story of knowing you're different to everybody else.
0:45 Speaker 01 Today, she's known for her wallpaper designs that cemented her place in Australian design history. But a shadow lingers over her legacy, her unsolved murder in 1977.
0:59 Speaker 05 It was a shock.
1:01 Speaker 03 I don't feel that the investigation was very thorough.
1:06 Speaker 05 All the evidence disappeared.
1:08 Speaker 01 Hello, I'm Kirsty Melville and this is the History Listen. And as producer Zoe Ferguson finds out, the story of Florence Broadhurst's many lives and her brutal end are as elaborate and intriguing as her designs.
1:26 Speaker 06 For one of the most influential and famous Australian designers of her time, I'm always surprised how few people seem to recognise the name Florence Broadhurst. I first heard about Florence through my sister Laura, who learned about her work while she was studying interior design in Sydney.
1:43 Speaker 07 Initially, I was drawn to Florence Broadhurst for the really strong, dynamic, bold prints. And then, you know, you look into the cockatoos and all of a sudden you've got this playfulness and really soft feeling. And then it all of a sudden goes to the geometric turnabout, so you have interlocking shapes that seem to move in front of you.
2:06 Speaker 06 And we didn't just see them as wallpapers, we saw them as artworks.
2:11 Speaker 07 So you've got to have that emotive response to her, and I really did. And I felt the energy and life from those artworks really coming out and speaking to me.
2:23 Speaker 06 After falling in love with Florence the designer, we then read about Florence the woman and discovered she had an incredible life. Florence Broadhurst presents a very colourful, not to say flamboyant, picture. She was what I think most people would think of as a typical artist, a very colourful woman.
2:41 Speaker 02 Orange-red hair, multi-stripe black and white dress, and at least six rings, two bracelets, a jewelled watch and earrings. But there were mysteries about her too.
2:51 Speaker 06 Florence lived many lives in her 78 years. She was a Queensland farm girl, a society lady. She was a performer, a teacher, a dressmaker and even ran a car and truck garage.
3:02 Speaker 02 Oh no, you shouldn't have brought that up. Not truck driver, oh dear.
3:07 Speaker 06 But it was her final chapter that really defined her and made a mark on Australian culture and design history.
3:14 Speaker 02 I'm really a designer. I've been born a designer and I've really been a designer all my life of one sort or another.
3:22 Speaker 06 That's Florence talking on the ABC's Ellis Blaine Show in 1969. Blaine asked her about her childhood and she paints quite a picture.
3:31 Speaker 02 My father was out here for some time and then back again in England, a cattle breeder. And he's breeding cattle and there's a place in London called Broadhurst Gardens. I don't find cattle very interesting. I go to the country here and you'll talk to the cows and they don't take any notice. Perhaps I was one of the branch of the family who strayed away from it.
3:49 Speaker 04 Was your father a wealthy man?
3:50 Speaker 02 Yes.
3:51 Speaker 04 Did this give you necessarily a happy childhood?
3:55 Speaker 02 Yes. He was able to buy me a piano because I wanted a piano at seven and a musician to become a musician, so he bought me a piano.
4:02 Speaker 04 Did you have servants?
4:03 Speaker 02 Oh, yes, always.
4:05 Speaker 03 Lies, lies, lies, lies. It's a fantasy and an interesting one.
4:11 Speaker 06 That's Helen O'Neill, journalist and author of the biography Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret and Extraordinary Lives.
4:19 Speaker 03 The truth of the background she was born into bears very little resemblance to what she's describing in really vivid terms here. And quite apart from anything else, she's pretending to be British because she...
4:37 Speaker 03 Had realised in Australia that if you want to get ahead, perhaps you need to press certain buttons. And the English aristocracy was absolutely one of them.
4:47 Speaker 06 So where was Florence born?
4:49 Speaker 03 Florence Maude Broadhurst was born on the 28th of July, 1899, in a little place called Mungie Station, which is near Mount Perry in Queensland. Tiny little place in a cattle station where her father was managing the property. This was sort of hard knocks living. But it wasn't too long before you see Florence, who always had the straightest of backs and wonderful deportment, looking sort of regal compared to her school chums.
5:21 Speaker 06 And the way she held and presented herself was her secret weapon to get out of Mount Perry, out of Queensland and out of Australia.
5:29 Speaker 03 She's clearly not terribly interested in staying in that dusty cattle station. She manages to sing her way out of the bush in her late teen years, onto the stage.
5:42 Speaker 06 Florence gets a gig as a singer in an ensemble and with it, a ticket out of Australia.
5:48 Speaker 03 Introducing the Smart Set Diggers. So she joined a troupe called the Smart Set Diggers, which was one of a number of performing troupes that she joined, and was getting great reviews. She knew that she was, as she later put it, destined for more.
6:06 Speaker 06 As Florence steps on board a ship for an overseas tour, she undergoes her first transformation. She becomes Miss Bobby Broadhurst.
6:16 Speaker 03 The milieu that she was stepping into was an interesting one too, because these performers, they were a lot of oddballs, but amazingly talented oddballs. So you had people who would not have been accepted in society back at that time, cross dressers, gay men, gay women. So when she stepped on board that first vessel to take her to those other countries to perform, she started to become something that was really very unusual for a woman of her age. She was travelling alone, she had no husband. She was just there to be herself.
6:52 Speaker 06 Then in 1926, after years of touring and performing in Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Delhi and Hong Kong, Florence goes to Shanghai.
7:01 Speaker 00 Why was Shanghai called Paris of the East? It's quite an amazing place.
7:05 Speaker 06 That's Andrew Field, Associate Professor of Chinese History at Duke Quinhshan University.
7:13 Speaker 00 Well, Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s was characterized by three words: light, heat and electricity. By the 1920s, had become quite a decadent city. So it was associated with Paris in terms of the number of its brothels, as well as other nighttime spaces such as cabarets.
7:36 Speaker 00 There were dazzling neon lights going down the main roads of the city like Nanjing Road. You would just see a parade of neon signs advertising the ballrooms and the cabarets and the hotels and the nightclubs, the cinemas and all the other fun entertainment zones of the city.
7:58 Speaker 06 And when jazz came to Shanghai in the 1920s, this city was full of Westerners.
8:04 Speaker 00 Several thousand Americans, British and French, and a scattering of other nationalities. And it was those people who kicked off the jazz age in the city, dancing to jazz tunes and started learning the foxtrot and the charleston.
8:24 Speaker 06 It was in this heady time that Florence sang and danced on stage and then reinvented herself again, this time as an entrepreneur.
8:35 Speaker 03 In 1926, launched what she called the Broadhurst Academy, which is a finishing school. She offers to teach everything from violin to pianoforte, as they called it, musical culture, Banjaleli playing and the charleston. So she's bringing her performing background into teaching a smorgasbord of things, targeting the wealthy British and American expats in the area. She wouldn't have told anyone where she came from at that point. I wonder if it's the first time Florence really began to develop that British accent. Because why would you employ someone from Nowheresville in Queensland
9:19 Speaker 03 to teach darling Daphne how to behave at the Royal Court? You wouldn't.
9:26 Speaker 00 Well, I think there are lots of stories of people from the Western world or the outside world coming to Shanghai, coming with a dollar in their pocket and reinventing themselves and becoming Taipans of industry. It was a boom town. So I'm sure that Florence Broadhurst's story was very typical of that time.
9:50 Speaker 06 But revolution was brewing in China.
9:52 Speaker 00 Between 1926 and 1927, foreigners in Shanghai were very nervous and many, in fact, left the country fearing the worst.
10:05 Speaker 06 In April 1927, hundreds of communists were arrested and tortured or killed. It was dubbed the Shanghai massacre and it was a pivotal moment in the Chinese revolution.
10:16 Speaker 03 Florence wisely dipped out, came back to Queensland to see the family and stay with them for a while in Mount Perry.
10:23 Speaker 06 During this trip back home, Florence did shows at her father's pub. But one night, an after-party went terribly wrong. She borrowed her dad's car with some friends and took a corner too fast. The car rolled and they survived.
10:37 Speaker 06 But Florence suffered a fractured skull. And we don't know why, but this incident marked the end of her career as a performer.
10:45 Speaker 03 You would think, perhaps, that that might be the end of it and she might have found a nice husband nearby and married into, you know, the cattle breeding royalty. No, no, she then went to London to start again.
11:04 Speaker 06 London, 1929. Florence falls in love and marries her first husband Percy Khan.
11:11 Speaker 03 It's a Catholic wedding. He's a stockbroker. The stock market was having big ups and downs at that time. And it's possible that the man, the family into which Florence thought she was marrying wasn't quite as she'd hoped it would be.
11:29 Speaker 03 Florence, at some point, begins to work with a dressmaker in London called Madame Courro.
11:38 Speaker 06 In the early 1930s, she opened her own dressmaking salon.
11:42 Speaker 03 Florence and her husband had become co-directors for something called Pelier Limited Robes and Modes, which was in New Bond Street in London. And to do this, Florence had created a new persona.
11:57 Speaker 06 Florence becomes a French dressmaker and calls herself Madame Pelier.
12:02 Speaker 03 When I was looking at the images of Madame Pelier, I could see Florence's face, but everything else is different. Her hairstyle is slicked down onto her head. She looked almost like one of those wonderful Hollywood movie stars from the black and white era, very much a chic, flapper style. She took out adverts that were beautifully illustrated and very cleverly written, telling the hoi polloi of London that if they needed something super special, she was the woman to go to because she was a French couturier who could make anything, darling, anything.
12:40 Speaker 06 It's around this time that Florence and Percy separate. And then, in the mid to late 1930s, Florence falls pregnant with her first and only child, Robert.
12:50 Speaker 03 But not to her previous husband Percy Khan. Florence had taken up with someone who's described on her son's birth certificate as a fruit merchant of 124 Kensington Park Road, Kensington.
13:08 Speaker 06 But World War II was looming, so Florence shuts up shop and Madame Pelier is no longer. We don't know much about Florence during the war years because there's a bit of a gap in the archives. We know she's living in Surrey and joins the Australian Women's Voluntary Services, but little else. After the war, in 1949, Florence, her new husband Leonard Lloyd Lewis, and their baby boy Robert travel to Sydney and settle in Manly.
13:40 Speaker 03 With Leonard, she began a series of businesses that really related around trucking and cars and transport, that kind of thing.
13:52 Speaker 06 And in her spare time, Florence tries her hand at being an artist, painting Australian landscapes.
13:58 Speaker 03 And sold them to the press as the visions of someone who'd never seen this before because they came from the UK and they were in Sydney to recover from the ravages of World War II. She wanted to be a great artist and she did have some success. It was a very proud moment when the David Jones Art Gallery gave her a solo show.
14:18 Speaker 06 But despite a couple of exhibitions in the mid 1950s, her painting career doesn't take off. So she puts aside those ambitions and focuses on running the family business. But only a few years later, Leonard moves to Queensland, leaving Florence and their son Robert to run the car yard in St. Leonard's.
14:37 Speaker 03 So Florence, at this point, is knocking on 60. So for many people, this is when you start winding down. She has discovered that her husband is leaving her for a woman younger than their son. Her entire world is collapsing. He's her business partner as well as the father of their only child. Many people, at that point, I think, would retreat from the limelight and lick their wounds. Florence did something really different.
15:09 Speaker 00 Florence, if you could live your life over, would you change anything?
15:12 Speaker 02 Yes, I'd change it all.
15:13 Speaker 00 To what?
15:14 Speaker 02 The whole lot.
15:15 Speaker 00 You can't be serious.
15:16 Speaker 02 I'm personally serious. I wouldn't have married the man I did and I wouldn't have stayed with them if I did. I should have got confidence to leave them and live my own life and express myself. I feel I'm... It's too late in the day. I'm trying to make up all the time for the years I wasted. So I'd change everything.
15:33 Speaker 06 As the 50s draw to a close, Florence opens a new chapter. Her life as a designer begins, all thanks to a moment of serendipity. One story goes that she went out to the shed behind the car yard to nag her young tenant to pay his rent. And when she went in, she saw he had wallpaper designs and colours he was experimenting with. She instinctively guided him, saying, "No, these wouldn't sell, but this would."
16:00 Speaker 03 And taught the tenant into creating for her the first of a series of designs that would later turn her into what she'd always wanted to be, which is an artistic figurehead in a city that needed, she felt, art, colour, vibrancy, culture.
16:20 Speaker 06 And so in 1959, she started her wallpaper business in the shed behind the car yard.
16:35 Speaker 03 Florence didn't just open up a wallpaper factory. What she opened up was a design studio where she employed artists to create artworks, which she then reproduced as high-level hand-printed wallpapers. Going from crazy psychedelics to amazing, almost anti-art geometrics that sometimes cross over into art deco swirls.
17:01 Speaker 02 Yes, well, you have to, because to balance a collection, you see, if I had all period designs, then what about the other people who want mod... you couldn't go on doing period design, you'd get bored too. And you know that there's a call for now, bright psychedelic colours and flowers, which I like. Well, then I do that in advance of people, I lead them into it, I've led them into colour. Now tremendously, because I know that I have a feeling for colour. Literally, they're the only person doing this in Australia, sure. Yes, yes, I am the only person in Australia doing it.
17:30 Speaker 03 I think her studio was unique in Australian design history. She was pushing the boundaries of what wallpaper could actually do at that point, developing foil wallpapers, all sorts of things that were not common and not easy to make.
17:52 Speaker 02 I was sitting at my manicurist waiting for her to come along and looked at my thumbnail, which looks so beautiful and so highly pearlised. And I thought, now that's what I should do. And by the time she came, I decided then to coat paper with this nail polish. And so I rang up France and they told me where to get it. And I rang up Japan and we got this nail polish, which I now coat the paper with, and it's coated in mother of pearl.
18:16 Speaker 06 This kaleidoscope of inspiration culminates in the vast and vibrant range of wallpaper designs Florence creates in the 60s and 70s, making an indelible mark on Australian design history.
18:33 Speaker 06 Some of her hallmark designs include one called peacocks. Two peacocks sit on a branch, looking in opposite directions, their tails draping down. Another popular design is called Japanese floral. That's one of my favourites. The flowers stand on stalks, reaching upwards, unfurling their petals. It's simple, elegant and active all at once. Florence used metallic papers for these designs, which really made them pop. They were completely different to what was on the walls of Australian homes at the time. Can you tell me about what was deemed risky in terms of interior design in the 1960s in Australia when you came here?
19:16 Speaker 03 Oh my god. A lot of things.
19:19 Speaker 06 That's Babette Hayes.
19:21 Speaker 03 I'm a journalist, interior designer. I've been at it for years and years. I came to Australia in 1965.
19:29 Speaker 06 And she noticed that Australians were very safe in their choices of interior design and wallpaper, and mostly importing it from overseas.
19:38 Speaker 03 Because it wasn't produced in huge quantities locally. But the thing about someone like Florence was that she produced unique designs. Some of them were incredibly large geometrics. There was one paper that was a whole row of Persian fans, big, big fans. Then there was another paper that had lots of beautiful peacocks. So you had to have the courage and the guts to use these in your home or in the office or wherever you were going to use them.
20:11 Speaker 02 People had been waiting for someone to do that. They'd been waiting to be let into it. They had no choice. If they hadn't got the choice, how can they express themselves?
20:18 Speaker 06 Florence's designs are elegant and timeless. And at a studio tucked away in St Peter's in Sydney, there are stacks of her original silkscreen prints.
20:30 Speaker 06 It's kind of tucked behind the Princess Highway and it's off a really famous laneway called May Lane. It's walls and corrugated iron, backs of gardens and sheds, just covered in street art. Decades ago, David Lennie became the custodian of Florence's silkscreen prints when he bought Signature Prints, the company that owned the Florence Broadhurst Library. Hi, nice to meet you. How are you? I'm good. Good. He and his small team spent years identifying and restoring the design archive. And right now, we're standing in front of them, hundreds of original Florence Broadhurst wallpaper silk screens.
21:15 Speaker 06 They've got wooden frames with a silkscreen pattern insert, and they're about a metre high and wide. Her wallpaper was a bit wider than normal, wasn't it?
21:25 Speaker 07 She went straight to American standard, which is 70 wide. So all the English and European, which was all that had come to Australia before, was all 50, 52.
21:35 Speaker 06 Why do you think she made it wider?
21:37 Speaker 07 Because you could have a bigger design. It gave you much more design freedom. It was really clever.
21:43 Speaker 06 And all the buckets are all the raw ingredients. You can see the metallics shimmering. Oh, they're beautiful. Yeah, all here. Yeah. To show me how it works, Sheridan Black, the owner of Signature Hand Prints, jumps into action and picks up a silkscreen of curly swirls. It's a timeless and psychedelic design. She lays paper on the long table and then places the silkscreen over the paper, pours black paint on top and with a squeegee-looking tool, runs the paint all the way down the screen.
22:18 Speaker 07 So it's the concept of open and closed.
22:22 Speaker 06 Mm-hmm.
22:22 Speaker 07 So certain sections of the screen are open. And so if I hold it up and show it to you, if you look through certain sections, you can see me. So they're called open. And that's where the ink passes through.
22:34 Speaker 06 Okay. How many designs did she make?
22:39 Speaker 07 She said she had over a thousand designs. Whether that was true or not, whether some had been disposed of, who knows? But we finished up with 530.
22:49 Speaker 06 That's an extraordinary number, isn't it?
22:52 Speaker 07 It's ridiculous. It's a huge library, much, much too big to have come out of one person's hand. It's come out of a design studio.
23:01 Speaker 06 There's some debate over whether Florence physically drew every wallpaper design herself, as she claimed. Florence's son, Robert, insists she did. But others, like David Lanny, think that's a little hard to believe.
23:14 Speaker 07 Her design students and her designers worked under her level of excellence. That's what you're doing. You're not holding the pen every day. But you can look over a shoulder and say, no, put that branch there. Or no, put that bird there. That's what your job is. And when you go through the library, they are really good designs because they are balanced and they work.
23:39 Speaker 03 Some people felt that hers wasn't the pen, that the pen belonged to the girls that she employed. There's also the fact that in the 70s, her eyesight was becoming so compromised. But the artistic vision was Florence, the hands were someone else's.
23:58 Speaker 06 How do we know that the hand wasn't hers?
24:01 Speaker 03 I didn't really talk to anybody who could tell me that it was.
24:05 Speaker 06 Florence and her designers worked really closely together, but that didn't mean they always got on.
24:11 Speaker 03 There were times when she was really quite harsh when she talked to her staff. Because she was very clear-cut about the way she wanted things to be, there was no nonsense about what she had to say. But in the end, it didn't seem to stop a lot of people because she was adding more and more printing tables. They were working incredible hours on producing a huge amount of wallpaper.
24:39 Speaker 06 But even though Florence may not have physically drawn each design, she was the designer. And in her designs, you can see glimpses of her life: places she'd been, cultures she'd experienced, and fabrics she loved.
24:54 Speaker 03 Everything Florence had seen in her remarkable life, everywhere she'd been, has voice in the images in one place or another. You can see, shadowed, and sometimes it's right in your face, the Orient. But specific things about the Orient: garments that she is photographed wearing. She had this innate understanding of what people wanted to buy. She really knew people. Her product was expensive, so it had to be people who had money.
25:30 Speaker 04 To meet her list of clients, you'd have to start at the very top of the social register and then very gradually make your way down.
25:38 Speaker 06 For a decade, Florence and her small team worked together in the workshop out the back of the truckyard on Sydney's North Shore. Then, in 1969, she moved to the inner eastern suburb of Paddington, closer to her clientele.
25:58 Speaker 06 I'm in Paddington in Sydney, standing outside of a pretty nondescript row of units. And it's where Florence's wallpaper studio used to be. She wanted to be among high society's movers and shakers, those with style, flair, and money. The new premises had a big factory downstairs that buzzed with designers, while upstairs, there was a showroom and Florence's office. And Florence showed no signs of slowing down, despite her age.
26:27 Speaker 02 You must be able to go on talking to people and go on designing. You don't sit down and chew the end of your pencil and wonder what's going on next. Your ideas must flow all the time. There's never a time when you haven't got dozens and you mustn't stop. It's no effort.
26:42 Speaker 06 But it's here, at her Paddington studio, that her incredible story is cut short.
26:48 Speaker 03 Because she was like a flame. It was as though nothing could extinguish her. But something did.
26:57 Speaker 07 Said they were carrying out routine investigations.
27:00 Speaker 01 On October the fifteenth nineteen seventy seven Florence Broadhurst was murdered.
27:04 Speaker 07 Apparently the assailant walked into the building through the open door.
27:08 Speaker 03 It was a shocking murder, shocking attack on a woman. The way she was beaten up and attacked was a horrific story.
27:18 Speaker 05 The neighbour had expressed concern for Florence Broadhurst in her factory as the front door was left open all night and the lights were on. He asked us to attend to check on her welfare.
27:28 Speaker 06 Tony Russell says he was one of the two police officers first on the scene who discovered Florence's body.
27:34 Speaker 05 I basically walked out, I was in shock, I needed fresh air because I was going to the fete.
27:39 Speaker 01 Next time in part two, Zoe Ferguson looks at Florence's untimely end and the police investigation into her murder.
27:49 Speaker 03 I don't feel that the investigation was very thorough. Detectives couldn't find the physical evidence collected at the time. Obviously it was someone who felt a lot of hate and anger. It appeared that Florence had known her killer.
28:05 Speaker 00 As I've grown to understand my grandmother's story, from different perspectives, our story has been surrounded by trauma and grief.
28:15 Speaker 01 That's next time on the History Listen. Today's story was produced by Zoe Ferguson. The sound engineer was Simon Branthwaite and I'm Kirsty Melville. Catch you next time.
Next Florence: A murder still unsolved – Part 2 Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated