The Lonesome Death of Florence Broadhurst

There is something amiss in the photograph above, something of which even the photographer was unaware. It is a photograph of the Australian designer Florence Broadhurst in her Sydney studio and was taken in the early 1970s. We see her sitting at her light-box in the midst of crafting her designs, designs typically made for luxury wallpaper or for fabric. She is counted as an orientalist artist - one of Australia's foremost orientalists - due to her fascination with and extensive appropriations of oriental design motifs, notably from China and Japan. She opened a design studio in Sydney in the 1960s and her designs quickly became famous both in Australia and abroad. Her fame diminished and her studio was disbanded after her death in 1977, but her designs have been advanced and championed lately - principally by her feminist admirers - and are today found in noteworthy establishments throughout the world. The one problem is - and this is the problem with the photograph referenced above - that Florence Broadhurst did not herself design her own designs but rather paid underlings to do them for her. She had extremely poor eye-sight and for this reason alone never worked on the designs produced by her studio under her name. The photograph above, like numerous others, was staged and released for public consumption in order to further the carefully crafted myth - or deception - of Florence Broadhurst, designer. The truth of it was a carefully kept secret. She employed graphic designers and they, in fact, were responsible for all the output of the workshop.

While such a deception might strike many as untoward, it is not entirely untraditional since, of course, artist workshops have been collaborative ventures since early times. It is only the modern sense of the artist as a singular genius that is offended. In reality, many great artists have been essentially entrepreneurs who employed, coordinated and took credit for the handiwork of skilled, but anonymous, workers. In our own times too, there are artists who have stepped outside the lone-artist-in-the-garret paradigm and have adopted a more industrial mode of production - the largely talentless Andy Worhol and his 'Factory' being the most famous. Moreover, for Florence Broadhurst the deception was hardly a new departure. She had spent her entire adult life engaged in often elaborate deceptions by which she would remake and reinvent herself in sundry guises; her reinvention in Sydney in the 1960s as a designer was one of a long list of masks she had created since growing up on a remote cattle station in outback Queensland. Most famously, and most notoriously - it offended the good farming folk with whom she grew up - she passed herself off as an English aristocrat for many years. Her life itself was her primary work of art, her identity her canvas. He deceptions were often brazen. When she was in her seventies she claimed to be in her forties. 

None of this is to say that the designs created by her studio were not her own inspirations. They undoubtedly reflect her own interests and influences and while others did the actual pen-to-paper work she no doubt exercised executive control over everything produced in her name. Her designs certainly reflect her oriental tastes. During the 1920s she established herself in Shanghai and opened what we would today term a 'finishing' school for young ladies, where elocution, literature, languages, ballroom dancing, music, journalism and other arts were taught. She was immersed in the lively culture and fashions of Shanghai in that era. Here is a picture of her, circa 1925:

Her designs from the 1960s and 70s, in any case, reflect the lasting impression Northern Asia had upon her sensibilities. Their often bold colours are to be explained by her poor eye-sight: she instructed her workers to produce designs she could at least see. But their dominant motifs and lines are essentially Asian. Like other orientalists she was engaged in a project to imitate and acquire aspects of oriental culture that she loved and admired. As we know, this entire project has been churlishly characterized by certain intellectuals as a nefarious colonialist and imperialist undertaking - although it seems that, as a celebrated feminist heroine, Miss Broadhurst is not deemed guilty of such crimes. Why not? Not only was she an accomplished liar, she was also an adept cultural thief who stole oriental design ideas - often from sacred contexts - and redeployed them as wallpapers for rich white elites. Critiques of orientalism are anything but consistent. 

Readers of these pages will know, of course, that the present author thinks otherwise. The over-riding consideration is that orientalist artists (and in this case designers) looked with extraordinary sympathy upon oriental cultures, and their appropriations and imitations were acts of flattery and admiration. East/west syntheses are very often sublime. The designs of the Florence Broadhurst studio are no exception. They are very fine works: a high light of Australian design. Australian culture has only rarely given due attention to the geographical proximity of the Australian continent to Asia. Australian artists have, by and large, been preoccupied with the problematic nature of Australian connections to European civilization and/or with the nature of the land and the unfamiliar and inaccessible nature of the indigenous heritage. Even today, other than an alcohol soaked misadventure in Bali, most Australians remain blissfully unaware of the fact that the great portion of the world's population lives just off the coast of Darwin. Few Australian artists have attempted an Austro/Asian synthesis. The ever-restless and creative Florence Broadhurst is one. A few of the designs bearing her good name - her studio produced over 800 designs in over 80 colours - are shown below where the adaptation of Asian motifs to a 1960s Paisley-like (sometimes psychedelic) aesthetic is apparent:

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Just as she lived an extravagant and flamboyant life, so too her death was remarkable. She was viscously murdered in her studio on the 15th of October, 1977, and to this day her murder remains unexplained. The assailant was never identified. No one was ever charged. It remains a mystery. The suspected murderer was the notorious 'Granny Killer' John Wayne Glover. An English immigrant, Glover was convicted of killing six elderly women, but police suspected him of killing numerous others. He did know Florence Broadhurst, having met her through her brother, although he did not know her well. Miss Broadhurst was found beaten to death with a lump of wood in her studio. It seems that she and the assailant had been sharing a cup of tea, and other evidence suggests the perpetrator knew his way around the premises. That is, it was almost certainly someone she knew. The motive appears to have been money. All of this points to Glover, although it was never proven and he never confessed to it. The nearest he came to a confession was an enigmatic sketch he made of two trees, one of them bearing the number nine, just before he suicided in his prison cell. It is interpreted by some to indicate that he killed nine women. 

It should be noted, though, that the six murders for which Glover was convicted were all committed in the years 1989/1990 - a good decade later than Miss Broadhurst's murder, and it is only speculation that he may have killed before that. Ostensibly, the trigger for his killing spree came in 1989 when his mother died of breast cancer and he himself contracted breast cancer - a humiliating 'female' disease - shortly afterwards. Yet there are a number of unsolved murders of elderly women in Sydney over a twenty year period, Broadhurst's being the most famous, and they all resemble the murders Glover is known to have committed. Until the case of Ivan Milat, John Wayne Glover - the Granny Killer - was Australia's most prolific serial killer. A gambler, his immediate motive was money, although he usually left his victims in a sexually exposed position. He stated at his trial - where his lawyers argued unsuccessfully for 'diminished responsibility' (the plea of insanity in Australian law) - that the crimes were committed while he was in a state of 'trance'. 

Harper McAlpine Black