A Life By Design

by Siobhan O'Brien

  Even before her son was born, Florence had imagined what sort of life she wanted to carve out for Robert. High on her list was a good education, self assurance, practicality and a sense of direction and of self worth. As Florence herself said, ‘The ideal society is one which offers each individual the precious chance of self fulfilment—the chance to be happy, to serve, to achieve.’ In her London diaries she surmised that if she ever had a son, she would:

  …want him to meet girls of his own age throughout his school career, to rid him of that curse of self-consciousness in the presence of women that has been such a handicap to many decent men. I am so tired of people in this world who are forever standing on their dignity. What a lot they miss, how they behave in their small mean minds.

  Later she mused:

  Marriage is such a final responsibility. For my son, I should struggle to see that everything in his teaching and environment at school would induce him to believe in his terms, that the consummation of a man’s destiny is rather marriage than material gains. At the same time, by all means, let his education be a practical one. Let him be taught how to type, to write in shorthand, to answer the telephone, to darn his own socks, to cook, how to dance and how to play tennis.

  Although Florence had high expectations of the sort of adult she wanted Robert to turn into, it is probable that mother and son had their differences. As ex-employee, Sally Fitzgerald pointed out, ‘I worked for Florence for four years and I only met Robert twice. Florence told me she would never leave her wallpaper business to Robert.’ David Miles, an architectural draughtsman who later set up David Miles Handprints in opposition to Florence’s wallpaper business reckoned, ‘I’m not sure what it was all about, but Florence didn’t speak to Robert for years. She went through a stage where she completely wiped him out of her life.’ It seems tension also existed between Robert and Leonard. Among Florence’s personal papers at the State Library of New South Wales is a letter from an exasperated Leonard, who was in Canberra at the time, saying:

  I will not ring from Canberra, tell Robert not to ring me, I shall not speak to him…I hate to tell you what has happened sweetheart but this cannot go on.

  With Robert at school and Leonard busy with work, Florence filled her car with fuel, packed a tent, sleeping bags, maps, clothes, wash tubs and painting paraphernalia and hit the road in search of scenes that inspired her. Though Leonard and Robert initially accompanied her on these trips (as Florence put it, ‘I’ll paint and they’ll fish’), they journeyed with her less and less frequently. Florence occasionally asked a girlfriend to come along, but she soon realised that she achieved more (and had the sort of trip she wanted) if she went alone.

  Her trips started as long weekends, then grew into weeks, fortnights and sometimes months in duration. In 1954 one of her journeys took three months from start to finish. From the early fifties onward, there weren’t many places in Australia she didn’t go, but she concentrated on the Northern Territory, Central Australia and Queensland. She always returned with dozens of canvases and sketchbooks filled with images of lush green canefields, fields of dried grass, street scenes, orange groves, tropical fruits and old stone houses with crumbling brick chimney stacks, which charmed her because ‘they’re so unlike anything English’ (Australia Magazine, 1954).

  On a trip to Queensland with Leonard in 1954, Florence revisited her childhood haunts: Maryborough, Bundaberg, Childers, the Bunya Mountains and the Great Barrier Reef. She even returned home to Mount Perry where she and Leonard pitched a tent by the creek near The Pines. While there, Florence set up her easel in the main street of Mount Perry and painted a large canvas of the Grand Hotel with electricity poles marching along a red and treeless street. The undulating countryside of her father’s Elliot’s Creek property is a feature toward the rear of the painting.

  On her return to Sydney, Florence’s only remark about her painting of the Grand Hotel, reproduced in full colour in the Australia Magazine in 1954, was a dismissive one: ‘There’s always an old hotel you know,’ she said simply. The article, titled ‘Ambassadress with a Paintbrush’, introduced Florence as ‘an Englishwoman, who came to Australia five years ago to escape Britain’s grey sky and rationing’. A comment from Florence follows: ‘Every day is a painter’s day in this country. In Britain you can paint on a few days only because the weather is usually too bad to set up your canvas outside.’ Interestingly, Florence made no reference to her Mount Perry childhood, the existence of her family, or Bill, who at this point was very ill (he died three years later). According to Ted Bettiens, it was ‘a thorn in Bill’s side’ that Florence so blatantly ‘dismissed her Queensland past’.

  By 1954, Florence estimated that she had travelled more than 20 000 miles (about 32 000 kilometres) throughout the Australian outback. A large part of this distance was clocked up when she went on a three-month-long adventure. After she returned from Mount Perry Florence flew from Sydney to Alice Springs, where she hired a truck ‘weighted with oil drums to keep the vehicle on the road’ before she ‘bumped her way over corrugated roads fifteen inches (about 38 centimetres) thick with dust’. Drawing on bush skills she had picked up from her father, Florence washed herself and her clothes in creeks, cooked over a campfire and slept under the stars.

  Her days were spent rattling along bush tracks in search of things to paint. When she located a scene worthy of her attention, Florence parked the truck in the shade, took out a giant beach umbrella and her palette of paints and set to work capturing the last light of the sun in purple and red streaks across the sky, the vivid red soil of the desert, the hazy outline of distant mountains at dusk or the sandstone outcrops that change colour as the morning creeps away. It was on this trip that Florence painted a dramatic, sweeping view of the MacDonnell Ranges. According to Florence this painting was commissioned by Sir Winston Churchill and she claims she sent it to his address in London. ‘Sir Winston told me he prizes it very highly,’ she remarked cheekily.

  When she returned to Sydney, Florence unashamedly used her adventures in the outback as a promotional tool for her impending exhibitions. In one press interview she said, ‘It’s a risk for a woman to go alone in the desert, but I’ve been lucky. I haven’t had an accident with the car, the spiders here aren’t very dangerous and the snakes never seem to attack me. The birds are very friendly. When I sit down and start painting, they soon see I’m not going to harm them, and they come closer.’ Another article reported the following: ‘Miss Broadhurst, who paints under her maiden name, spends much of her time travelling in the outback…She sketches and paints wherever she goes’ (Australia Magazine, 1954).

  The David Jones Art Gallery on Elizabeth Street, Sydney, provided the scene for Florence’s first solo exhibition called ‘Paintings of Australia’. Launched on 19 May 1954, over one hundred of her paintings filled three rooms. Among the images of beaches, deserts, streetscapes, buildings, landscapes, animals, people and plants, one of the main attractions was the sizeable canvas of Mount Perry’s Grand Hotel. Sydney art critics hailed her work as ‘…alive, dynamic and vital. An astonishing effort…her statements are rhapsodical manifestoes, relying on a rich impasto for much of their force…’ and ‘…the artist favours bold patterns, and exploits colour gradations…her robust approach accentuates every mood…’ Other reporters were less than impressed. This review was published in the Sydney Morning Herald on the same day as her exhibition opened:

  The paintings of Florence Broadhurst have been hibernating in quite a different climate. In this big exhibition of 108 works at David Jones’ Art Gallery, the past is recalled in a beautiful technicolour dream. In fact, ‘beauty’ is very much in evidence, even when such titles as ‘Opal beauty of the Reef’ or ‘Scorched Beauty’ do not support the idea among other works…Miss Broadhurst is undoubtedly fond of the Australian landscape, a sentiment to be applauded. Yet her gifts are insufficient to lend emphasis to that love. One cannot help but feel that she does not understand the true character of the landscapes
she paints, that her eye, indeed, only devours surface beauties, skin deep at best, without realising the structure beneath. Here, above all, a case can be made out for further study in the very rudiments of painting, even if only to strengthen the vague ideas in ‘Scorched Beauty’, ‘Summer Rhapsody’, ‘The Swamp’ or ‘Sub-tropical Beauty’, when Opus 109 sees the light of day.

  Despite the potentially damaging nature of this bad review, it did little to affect Florence. When ‘Paintings of Australia’ featured at Finney’s Art Gallery in Brisbane later the same year, a reporter from the Canberra Times claimed the launch of the show ‘set record attendance figures’.

  The stir that Florence caused in the press meant that both the Sydney and the Brisbane exhibitions sold out and she had no work left to take to England to ‘encourage more British migrants’ to come to Australia. Later she exhibited her work with an ‘Australiana’ theme at Anthony Hordern & Sons Art Gallery in Sydney and the Masonic Hall in Bathurst. She also arranged for a representative from the British Arts Council to launch (and add credence to) her large exhibition in Canberra.

  Florence was soon involved in collaborative exhibitions with other Australian artists of note. The All Nations Club, on Bayswater Road in Kings Cross, was the venue for the Ten Guinea show that was launched on 12 October 1954. Florence’s painting Autumn Trees, Orange featured alongside Australian artists including Roland Wakelin (who painted a moody evening scene at Double Bay), Judy Cassab and James Gleeson. A positive response from critics and the public alike soon prompted Florence to submit her work to the prestigious Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes. Her submission to the 1961 Archibald Prize was a very vibrant, yet sad and reflective, self-portrait. It is now part of the collection at the State Library in Sydney. The Queensland Art Gallery also acquired one of Florence’s landscape paintings called Wind of the South which they paid 25 guineas for on 3 August 1954. It is now insured for two thousand dollars. As the title suggests, the oil on a canvas composition board painting features a windswept landscape that looks like a quintessential south coast of New South Wales beach scene. It comprises a tangle of grassy tussocks on a sandy knoll with the sea and sky on the distant horizon. Other information accessed from the Queensland Art Gallery also suggests that Florence entered some of her oil paintings into the H.C. Richards Memorial Prize for Painting in 1954 (Temporary Defeat) and 1955 (Untitled). The remainder of her work now exists in family and private collections. A small portion of these consist of the thirty-one paintings that Robert sent to auction after her death in 1981.

  •

  Art might imitate life but is never life itself. Florence needed other outlets. Soon, after all this success with her painting, Florence was in demand on the public speaking circuit. It was not the first time that she had stood in front of a crowd at the pulpit. She was first introduced to public speaking while living in London in the thirties, when she was a voluntary speaker for the Women-for-Westminster Movement and a member of the Conservative Party’s panel of speakers (through which Florence said she met and befriended Sir Winston Churchill).

  In London and in Sydney Florence gave impassioned lectures on art, business and the place of women in world affairs. She delivered her speeches with passion, vigour and eloquence. Just as Florence had once admired (and modelled herself on) entertainers such as Gladys Moncrieff and Dame Clara Butt, her new exemplaries were thinkers, writers and public speakers, among them people like Winston Churchill, Lady Ravensdale and Ethel Mannin.

  Florence’s lectures were often peppered with pompous Churchillian-style phrases such as, ‘There are men whose manners have the same essential brilliance as the ancient Greeks’ and ‘All of us can figuratively look out on a world…and watch with clearer eyes the personalities and trends and events which in the aggregate constitute the cavalcade of contemporary history’.

  Never missing an opportunity to use these many social events to her advantage, her lectures (at the Royal Empire Society, the Voice, Interests and Education of Women’s Club, the United Nations Association of Australia and the Australian Society for Medical Research to name a few) were always accompanied by the donation of one of her paintings. Florence became even cleverer at promoting her work by infiltrating Sydney’s social set, serving on charity committees, arranging décor for balls and being chums with socialites such as Jill Wran, Pattie Menzies, Jeannie Little and Lady Sonia McMahon, who naturally asked for her decorating advice. She devoted herself to a number of charities including the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, the YWCA, the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and the New South Wales Rotary Clubs. Though her long list of charity contributions looks impressive, Ria Murch, who worked with Florence at an Australian Red Cross Society op-shop on Market Street in Sydney, was dismissive of her contribution: ‘She was a bloody nuisance who didn’t know the first thing about working in an op-shop. She flitted about like a bloody butterfly.’

  Florence had bigger and better fundraising ideas than op-shops, fetes and crocheted doilies. In 1957, she organised a competition (in association with the International Ball Committee and the United Nations Association) to find a national costume for the men and women of Australia. Two hundred entrants battled for the prize of a holiday to Lord Howe Island and the chance to parade their design at the glitzy art deco nightclub The Trocadero, located on George Street, Sydney. A bank clerk from Mosman and a professional artist from Wentworthville were the winners. For the Sheilas there was an olive dress with a trim of wattle-inspired patterns and a wide-brimmed sun hat; and for the Bruces there were moleskin trousers tucked into leather boots and a gold shirt with a green neck tie. As a reporter remarked at the time:

  We’ve had to wait for an Englishwoman to sense the need for a new symbol of the warratah and wattle spirit with which Henry Lawson and his contemporaries stirred our somewhat lethargic embers of patriotism 50 years ago. This time, instead of a poet, it’s an artist—Florence Broadhurst—who has started the crusade.

  Though it was Florence who kick-started the concept for the competition, Phyllis Shillito took time out from her teaching post at the East Sydney Technical College to help Florence judge the entries. Florence could not have had a better assistant. Phyllis (who later established and ran the Shillito Design School in Sydney from 1962–80) is widely regarded as a crucial player in the advancement of Australian design.

  But it was at a charity preview of the MGM movie Dunkirk, that Florence really made a splash on Sydney’s social scene. The 1958 film starred Bernard Lee, John Mills and Richard Attenborough and screened at the St James Theatre. It was preceeded by a cocktail party at the Forum Club. Leonard Lloyd Lewis recalled the event, organised by his wife, who was by this stage the president of the Red Cross Ball Committee: ‘The house was packed and before the preview Florence made a speech. She was superbly gowned. She literally shimmered. When she had finished, the Governor-General, Sir William Slim, dug me in the side with his elbow during the thunderous applause and said,“Absolutely wonderful. That’s the most Churchillian speech I’ve ever heard.” For me it was a crowning moment and a very apt description of Florence. She was Churchillian in outlook. She had a completely undaunted spirit’ (Australian Women’s Weekly, 1977).

  To coincide with the event, the commissioning editor of the Daily Mirror asked Florence, to pen an article that reflected her personal experiences of World War II. The article was published on 10 July 1958:

  I shall never forget the feeling that swept through England. The fact that 90 000 men were taken off the beaches in 700 craft, of all types, was nothing short of a miracle—it was divine intervention that the Channel should be calm enough for them to make the crossing, and that the Luftwaffe shouldn’t bomb them into extinction. For the men and women who helped achieve that glorious retreat it was, I believe, the greatest moment of their lives, an opportunity to carry the torch of freedom. If we had surrendered then we would have lost the freedom of the world—it was the turning point of the war. Now it has become a memorial of Britain’s hour of
greatness. The miracle of Dunkirk was such a source of inspiration that the whole atmosphere in England changed—men worked in factories till they dropped. I saw them under their machines where they’d fallen asleep and couldn’t work another minute. Bombs fell, people were killed but nobody complained—they’d got the will to go on.

  Florence, who had by now gained a reputation for embellishing the truth, also exaggerated her time living on the poverty line: ‘My impending blindness is due to the war. A lack of vitamins in my diet apparently created the condition. I’m not alone in this—thousands of English people have suffered the same way—thirteen years was a long time without proper food.’

  And true to form, Florence didn’t miss the opportunity to use the newspaper article to promote her work:

  When the Dunkirk premiere is over (and the International Ball, for which I’ve been working also) I’m going back to my painting…I’ve been away from painting for a year and I’ve missed it terribly. Now I’m going on with my collection of Australiana, while I can. When I have 100 paintings together, I shall hold exhibitions in London, Paris and New York. I shan’t be able to go outdoors, the sunlight is far too strong and the distances too great for me to see to paint the wonderful bizarre colours of Australia’s scenery. I shall paint that great outdoors in my studio from memory with what sight I have left.

  •

  At fifty-eight years of age, Florence’s failing eyesight did little to quell her appetite for wild colours. On the contrary, her inability to see as well as she used to (combined with her stubborn refusal to accept her doctor’s advice to slow down), fuelled Florence’s passion for anything bigger, bolder and brighter. She dyed her hair pink and wore outfits that were completely over the top. The Florence that actress and author Kate Fitzpatrick remembered wore false eyelashes that were dyed red to match the colour of her hair: ‘I’m not sure where she got them, I’ve never seen them since, but they were nothing short of absolutely startling.’ Her sister, Sally Fitzpatrick, who worked for Florence from 1967 until 1970, remembered being called upon to stick the false eyelashes on Florence once or twice a week: