Extravagant Hats and a Suave Manner

Robert Freestone and Bronwyn Hanna - Florence Taylor's Hats: Designing, Building and Editing Sydney, Ultimo, NSW: Halstead Press, 2007

By Janine Burke

Florence Taylor has much in common with that other talented bluffer and braggart - Florence Broadhurst. The latter, a successful Sydney wallpaper designer, was so adept at reinvention that her identity remains a series of shifting, enigmatic images. Born in outback Queensland, Broadhurst travelled to Shanghai in the 1930s where she became a chanteuse. In wartime London, she cast herself as a French couturier called Madame Pellier. Returning to Australia, she announced she was an English painter destined to immortalise the Australian landscape. When that plan fell flat, Broadhurst became a designer, running a studio in a tin shed next door to her truck and car yard in Crow's Nest. A partygirl and a celebrity seeker with a manner that was as brazen as her sense of style, Broadhurst was, well, very Sydney. She is the sort of fabulous liar who belongs in a Peter Carey novel. Taylor and Broadhurst belong to a coterie of larger-than-life Sydney women modernists that includes Margaret Preston, that stormed its way around town, demanding and gaining attention. (Freestone and Hanna mention neither Broadhurst nor Preston.) Taylor used extravagant hats and a suave manner to advertise herself. Preston, known as 'Mad Maggie', threw a plate of cakes at fellow painter Thea Proctor when she learnt that Proctor's work had been bought by the Art Gallery of NSW while hers had not. It is an apocryphal tale, probably cooked up by Preston herself. They were a cheerfully shameless bunch of women. Freestone and Hanna's detailed introduction describes the arc of Taylor's brilliant career, as well as her some of her other, more odious qualities. She was Australia's first professionally qualified, practising woman architect. She was the first woman in Australia to qualify as an engineer and the first to fly a glider. She was a planning advocate, as well as writer, editor and publisher for Building magazine. She made heaps of money and assumed the role of a grande dame in Sydney's social scene. She was, as the authors describe her, ‘patrician yet gracious, formidable and opinionated, impeccably dressed in beautiful Edwardian style dresses and sporting a grand hat.’ For all that Taylor seems to qualify as a feminist icon, her politics were rightwing, even fascist-leaning at times, and she ‘railed against unions, strikes, Labor politicians and bureaucratic controls of all kinds.’ Importantly for her time, Florence married well. At the turn of the twentieth century, it was hard work to be a gifted, ambitious woman without the respectability and financial clout of a solid, middleclass marriage. Thea Proctor's fate, struggling to survive by painting fans and running art classes, is a case in point. George Taylor was an intriguing imp of a man. Trained as an architectural draughtsman, he was also a cartoonist, writer and pamphleteer. George also boasted a string of firsts - the first person to transmit a picture by radio and the first man in Australia to fly. Like Margaret Preston, who married wealthy businessman William Preston, as soon as Florence was hitched ‘the triumphing Taylors’ went on grand global tours. Then they designed their own home and began a publishing business. Where did Florence's chutzpah come from? Her mother died in 1896, when she was seventeen, her father when she was twenty. She had two younger sisters to take care of. She probably worked as a housmaid before getting a job as a clerk with the architect Francis Stowe. It seems likely she had an affair with Stowe, who took her under his wing, and helped her financially. Stowe's family was not impressed with Florence. One of his daughters described her as ‘amoral, ruthless and selfish.’ Such ugly, uncomfortable details are omitted from Florence's life story as she told it, countless times, to journalists and others. The affair with Stowe, the authors suggest, may have also been a reason she was “black-balled” when she attempted to gain accreditation from the NSW Institute of Architects in 1907. Where are Florence's buildings? In various interviews, Florence declared she had designed fifty, even a hundred houses in her spare time. But, as Freestone and Hanna point out, ‘her design work remains almost unknown and establishing her singular authorship of any extant buildings...has proved surprisingly challenging.’ After extensive research, the authors can state there are ‘several homes...[that] were respectable expressions of the Federation Style’ that can be linked to Florence. They are obviously frustrated by the lack of documentation, especially ‘within a life where memorialising of achievements was habitual.’ I don't mind that Florence's buildings may have largely been castles in the air. It seems she was too busy creating the space to frame and represent her self to contribute in any significant manner to the built environment. The inner struggle, the persistent need to attract attention that suggests a desperate hunger for affirmation, was always going to subsume external ambitions, such as completing major, solo, architectural commissions. Florence, with her hats and her vaulting ego, was her own edifice, her own construction. Her choice of profession may have been accidental, but architecture - the realisation of a habitable, three dimensional dwelling - provides an interesting metaphor for a young woman's need to control her destiny, to make the space that is her own, to locate and shelter her self. Temperamentally, Florence shares with architects, traditionally forming a stubborn and visionary profession, the will to power that brooks no demur. While the book is meticulously researched, it has not been served well by its publishers. For example, in the Introduction, do we also need a section devoted to the Structure of the Book? It is a flaw of academic publishing to bang the reader on the head with too much detail, too many restatements of the central thesis. Sentences are sometimes plodding, lengthy and archaically phrased. Beginning a sentence with 'one might have expected' is positively nineteenth century, let alone twentieth. A good editor would winnow out such inconsistencies that deaden the book's lively and engaging tone. It would have also been valuable to contexturalise Taylor with other prominent and dynamic Sydney women modernists involved in art and design such as Preston, Proctor and Broadhurst. Janine Burke is Monash Fellow, Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research and School of English, Communications and Performance Studies. Her books include Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940, Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide.