Either way, armed with her sharp business acumen, a penchant for work and a passion for vibrant colours, Florence threw herself into the wallpaper business. With only a handful of prospective clients, she established herself as the only Australian producing screen-printed wallpapers. Florence now juggled managing the trucking business, running Australia’s only wallpaper factory and maintaining her much-loved painting. As a journalist from People Magazine in 1963 put it, ‘tall, vital Florence Broadhurst lives three lives’.
To squeeze everything into her day, Florence rose at 6 am and painted for two hours in her Potts Point penthouse before arriving at the truck yard at around 8.30 am. She spent the rest of her day juggling two worlds that were each other’s polar opposites: trucks and wallpaper. She barely had time to eat. Her holidays were a thing of the past. Florence even worked on weekends. And when she returned home in the early evening she devoted what spare time she had to her new love of portraiture.
When Florence started her wallpaper business, she had only two printing tables (inherited from John Lang) and two assistants who helped her produce around twenty rolls of hand-printed paper a week. It wasn’t long before three other employees joined the crew. As Florence commented to a journalist at the time, ‘I employ five people in the factory, and I do the work of four myself, so we manage.’
To protect the paper from incessant leaks in the ceiling, Florence installed oversized beach umbrellas along the length of each printing table. It was underneath these makeshift awnings that Florence designed her bright, bold and striking work ‘among the stacks and piles of wallpapers and finished designs stretched on racks to dry with girls fanning the air above them’ (Australian Home Journal, 1968). A journalist from the Australian in 1968 described her workplace rather romantically as ‘a frail white timber and glass ediface rising from a sea of geranium tubs behind a garage’. Despite having enthusiastic staff, eager to work and learn, Florence often complained there was ‘no pool of labour’ for her to rely upon. As she once said: ‘Each new member of staff had to be thoroughly trained by me. Even so, I found that they need constant supervision.’
Twelve months after Florence first opened her doors for business she issued her first catalogue. As Florence explained in a speech called ‘Personalisation Pays Off’, which she delivered on the public speaking circuit, she had carefully analysed her target market: ‘Who was I aiming to supply? In the beginning, not the lower income bracket—I was interested in the people who could appreciate an original article and who wanted something other than mass produced items,’ she said. Her catalogues were released to a number of carefully selected interior design and architectural firms in Sydney and Melbourne. According to Florence, ‘This step actually proved to be the best method of maintaining consistent sales, as the decorators and architects involved me with supplying restaurants, clubs and companies as well as private clients.’ In February 1962, two years after her catalogue was issued, the Decorator Clinic in Grace Bros on Broadway hosted a display of Florence Broadhurst wallpapers. The colours and designs of this exhibition summed up the mood and feel of the sixties: brave, garish and kitsch.
When Florence appeared on the Australian interior design scene it had (by international standards) just turned the corner from childhood into puberty. As late as the thirties, the majority of interior design hardware was being imported from abroad, while in the fifties many Australians were still living in dark, stuffy homes that were not conducive to the antipodean environment. The fifties and sixties marked a time when the pioneering work of organisations such as the Contemporary Art Society, the Commercial and Industrial Artists Association, the Design and Industries Association and the Society of Designers for Industry, which did much to promote the awareness and appreciation of design in Australia, started to pay dividends. Designers of note who made their mark on the new style that started to emerge at this time included acclaimed industrial designer Gordon Andrews, who not only designed Australia’s new decimal currency notes of 1966, but created furniture and interiors for the New South Wales Government Tourist Bureau and the Australian Trade Commission; the multi-talented Max Forbes, who among other things designed the exhibition display for the 1956 Industrial and Graphic Design Exhibition that was part of the Melbourne Olympic Games Arts Festival and is considered to be Australia’s first substantial design survey; graphic designer, painter and industrial designer of note, Alistair Morrison, otherwise known as Professor Afferbeck Lauder, the author of the book that defined the wonderful language of ‘Strine’; Douglas Annand, who designed publicity material, textiles, murals and sculptures for companies such as Qantas, David Jones, P&O Orient Line, CSR and Shell; Anne Outlaw and Alexandra (Nan) Mackenzie, the creative founders of the Sydney-based Annan Fabrics—not to be confused with Douglas Annand—who landed a plethora of prestigious commissions and exhibited around the world; Clement Meadmore, now an internationally revered sculptor based in New York; furniture designers Fred Ward, Grant Featherston and Douglas Snelling; Woollahra-based interior designer, colourist and businesswoman Marion Hall Best, who introduced many Australians to innovative furniture produced by world-class designers such as Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi, Harry Bertoia and bold fabrics from Finland’s Marimekko; and fabric designer and artist Frances Burke, who was a founding member of the Society of Industrial Designers Foundation and the Industrial Design Institute of Australia (now the Design Institute of Australia). It is a list that would not be complete without the mention of two other Australians who don’t strictly fall into the realm of design. They include Martin Sharp, arguably Australia’s most prominent popular artist, who first came to public attention in the early sixties for his cartoons in Oz, a satirical street magazine, and who later produced a host of internationally recognised posters, prints and record covers; and architect Harry Seidler, arguably Australia’s leading architect of the modern movement, who has done much to change the perception of design in Australia and is the first architect in Australia to completely express the principles of the Bauhaus.
Even though Florence found herself in extremely good company, she swiftly made an ascent and found her niche in Australia’s blossoming design industry. Anne-Marie Van de Ven, the curator of decorative arts and design from the Powerhouse Museum, claims that what differentiated Florence from her contemporaries was that Florence’s venture was unique: ‘Australian (Hand Printed) Wallpaper was unashamedly global in both its sources of inspiration and its marketing focus.’ But it was not, as Florence often boasted, the first and only wallpaper factory in the southern hemisphere. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Australia had produced a swag of wallpaper manufacturers that included Melbourne’s William Gutheridge, circa 1851; Charles Carter, who exhibited his work in the mid-1860s and who specialised in ‘royal stamped burnished gold paper hangings of his own design’; the Painters and Paperhangers’ Society of Victoria, that served as an early mediator for home grown and imported wallpaper in the late nineteenth century; Adelaide’s J.W. Williams and Sydney’s Gilkes & Co., who incorporated Australian motifs into their papers; and Morrison’s, which was based on George Street, Sydney, in the twenties, who offered ‘hand made Borders, Friezes and Wall Decorations…printed and designed in Australia’. These early papers ranged from conservative prints that were ‘light cheerful patterns, well covered, not particularly “showy”—the neater and smaller the pattern the better’ (Murphy, P. 1996); friezes that depicted landscapes and historical scenes; stylised art nouveau motifs such as roses and tulips; and elaborate ornamentation that combined ceiling papers, borders, friezes and stencilling all in the same room towards the end of the nineteenth century, when Australians were feeling a little braver.
Florence now had a new mission. Her desire was to ‘cure people who display symptoms of the timid decorator syndrome. You spot them easily. They’re always afraid of bold design and bright colour. When you suggest a perfectly suitable paper, they shy away with the same old excuses…“Oh but my kitchen’s much too small for that!�
� or “Heavens! If I put that up I’d have spots before my eyes”’ (Australian, 1968). As Florence said in an article aptly titled, ‘We are now not so nervous of colour’, which featured in the Sydney Morning Herald on 20 May 1966, ‘You can state your character by your choice of wallpaper.’ As Florence saw things, Australians were afraid of colour, preferring monochromatic tones that she believed were not vigorous enough to withstand modern living. ‘Many [Australians] still think of wallpaper as something drab that grandmother had on the wall,’ she said in the same article. Florence made it her business to change that perception.
By 1963, four years after the business commenced, the demand for Florence Broadhurst’s wallpaper spiralled out of control. It was at this time that the tables, the rolls, the screens and the pots of paint outgrew the ‘frail white edifice’ and Florence arranged for an annex to be added to the building. She painted the ceiling of the extension in shimmering metallics and overlayed it with the first paper that she had ever designed: an off-white design sparsely dabbed with gold. On the floor, seven assistants battled to fill international orders. Gone were the days when Australian (Hand Printed) Wallpapers printed a meagre twenty rolls of paper a week. Now it pumped out two hundred rolls each week, with each roll taking around three weeks to prepare for printing. Ex-employee Ben Fitzpatrick remembered how tedious and time consuming the printing process was:
Printing Flo’s wallpapers was back-breaking work that was extremely complicated and time consuming. We spent eight hours a day bending over long printing tables, pulling the heavy squeegee manually over each screen, back and forth, trying to ensure that each layer of colour was applied correctly and matched up with the next roll. And because some of her designs had up to five or six colours in them, this seemed close to impossible at times, but somehow we managed to do it.
Ben, whose mother is acclaimed Australian artist and author Dawn Fitzpatrick and whose sister is actor and author Kate Fitzpatrick, claimed the design process was equally as arduous:
Because all of Flo’s designs were done by hand, the designers had to sit down with a pen and a paintbrush and draw every single dot, every single stroke and every single minute detail. There were no printers or scanners to rely on back them; just manual labour, and a lot of time and commitment. To put it bluntly, it was an insane amount of work.
Ben’s other sister Sally Fitzpatrick, who is now an artist based in the United States, also worked for Florence. Her forte was drawing and designing. She said:
I was fresh out of a convent school and I’d just shifted to Sydney. I was only seventeen years old when I went for my job interview at the Crows Nest shed. When I arrived at the studio Flo had another head designer, a young, perpetually drunk party girl who wasn’t doing a very good job, and Flo asked me, ‘Where’s the portfolio of your drawings?’ I replied that I didn’t realise I had to bring one along, so Flo sent me home and said I had to come back with some evidence that I could draw. If she liked me, she’d pay me eighteen dollars a week; if she didn’t I’d have to go. I spent the night putting some drawings together and when I went to see her the next day she accused me of tracing them, but she still gave me the job. Once she could see I had the skill, she soon got rid of the party girl and I became her head designer. I was in tears every day for the next six months because Flo was so overwhelmingly powerful, but I continued to work for her for the next four years and we ended up being great friends. I adored her. She ended up being instrumental in moulding me in my youth. She showed me how to see a wilder, brighter world.
In 1963, there were now eighty designs in the Florence Broadhurst collection, including chaotic psychedelic swirls, orderly geometric patterns, Hellenic prints, Aztec symbols, exploding stars, mutating shapes, peacock feathers, fans, oriental filigree, bamboo, arabesques, art nouveau swirls, English florals, poppies, ferns with hatched fronds, blossoms, butterflies, storm clouds and quirky nursery prints. Some were masculine, tough and commanding, while others were feminine, soft and delicate. Like their creator, they were unique, arresting and ahead of their time. They packed a punch.
Much of the inspiration for these designs no doubt came from her travels through Asia and Europe, but it was when Florence arrived back in Australia in 1949 that she first experimented with bold, bright designs. Only one journalist who visited Florence’s Manly studio in the fifties was astute enough to notice Florence’s psychedelic paintings hidden among her Australian canvases. It is hard to imagine how they could be overlooked. The paintings were bursting with vibrant, graphic patterns and pre-empted the drug-induced psychedelia of the sixties. The journalist said, ‘Besides her serious work you will see what amounts to mediumistic design…swirls and patterns which appear to come from the subconscious’.
Florence agreed that her work had a ‘mediumistic’ quality. She claimed to the journalist that her designs appeared in her mind at all hours of the day and night, and that she had so many creative ideas she could never keep up with them all. ‘You get so involved with art you lose track of time…I’m sure there would be no psychiatric wards if there was more art. People who take LSD must be terribly bored. I don’t need it’ (Australian Home Journal, 1968).
Colour was Florence’s forte. She made an exacting art out of mixing paint to match her clients’ samples of carpet, upholstery fabrics, artwork and the like. Florence Broadhurst wallpaper could be printed in any colour or in any combination. ‘I mix all the colour. Industrial chemists sometimes take three days to do this—I do it in three minutes! You’re either a colourist or you’re not,’ she declared to the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1965. Florence also did brisk business custom designing paper for clients who wanted something special or who were too far away to visit her in Crows Nest. Florence received swags of letters and from her headquarters she spun her intuitive magic and gave her correspondents’ homes a makeover. As Florence explained, ‘I’ve had orders from Thursday Island, Perth and New Zealand. A woman living way up in the Gulf of Carpentaria wrote and described her “room for entertaining”—I thought she must entertain crocs or something. They all write telling me about the room, where the windows are and such, and I design something to fit. I’ve never had anybody send it back yet.’ By 1965 Florence claimed that she developed a new design every week. Her philosophy was to give people choice because as she put it, ‘people want something to reject, don’t they?’ (Australian Women’s Weekly, 1965).
What set Florence apart from her overseas competitors was that her wallpaper designs could not be cut from the old stencil method and that her custom-designed screens were a one-off. When a client collected their individually designed roll of paper, they also had the opportunity to collect the individually made screen. Florence was a perfectionist with a highly personalised business approach. Even though she employed a troupe of assistants that included David Bond, Florence’s loyal head printer who remained with her from 1960 until the day she died in 1977, she still watched over every element of production, including design, screen-making and colourmixing and printing. She worked closely with her employees and never missed a trick. As she explained to the Sun in 1962, ‘I’ve found a team of young artists who have just completed their courses. I tell them what I want and then correct and make improvements to their work until we have the perfect design.’ One of these artists was a thirty-year-old mother of two, Annie Georgeson.
In 1966, Annie spotted an advertisement for Florence Broadhurst wallpaper in a magazine. ‘Basically I decided to give her a call and ask Florence whether I could come and learn the art of silkscreen printing from her,’ Annie told me. She added:
But as Florence explained, she didn’t normally take students, but for some reason she decided to take me on. When I arrived at the tin shed at Crows Nest, she had taken on another student, an American woman, as well. As far as I’m aware we were the only students Florence Broadhurst ever had. Of course Florence had young artists in her employ, but Florence was paying these people. We never worked for her.
For the ne
xt year, Annie and ‘the woman from America’ frequented the tin shed in Crows Nest three days each week. Their days were filled with lessons on drawing up designs, amending designs, cutting stencils and printing. ‘Florence was very encouraging of our work. We all got on well. She was a great innovator,’ said Annie. Florence’s students were allocated space and benches at one end of the shed and executed their work (which they later took home with them) in an environment that Annie describes as practical, unsophisticated, yet bustling with activity:
Although Florence had a thousand other tasks to attend to, she still gave us the time of day. You got the feeling that David Bond, her head printer, who was like a permanent fixture at the truck yard, helped everything run more smoothly for Florence. He was like her anchor. He was competent at what he did and enjoyed it. They appeared to work well together. He was laid back, comfortable, friendly and she was like a volcano, a whirlwind. But though they worked well as a team, I remember thinking I’d rather be learning from her than working for her. She was extremely demanding. But I think she really needed David so she cut him some slack.
Ben Fitzpatrick agreed with Annie’s assessment of the relationship between David and Florence: ‘David was a dinky-di Aussie bloke who made Florence her money. He was a hard worker and Florence gave him a trade. What he did took real skill, he was a craftsman.’ And according to Sally Fitzpatrick, ‘Florence pulled David Bond off the streets. He was a boxer. He was a great guy and Florence saved him. He was with her from the beginning, right to the bitter end. I believe she loved him very much.’
A Life By Design Page 10
