70s sydney image: Florence Broadhurst photo by Lewis Morley 1975

Seventies Sydney and the Queer Creative Economy

What part did gay entrepreneurship play in Sydney’s nascent design culture? 

Sydney’s recent cultural history is relatively under-examined. This project considers the city’s participation in global movements in the design and creative industries and the part played locally by arts philanthropy and gay entrepreneurship.

This HDR opportunity is part of a larger project on Florence Broadhurst and the social and sexual dimensions of Australian creative culture. We seek to recruit an emerging researcher interested in gay history and culture to undertake an original study of gay-owned or gay-run art, design and homewares businesses in central Sydney in the 1970s.

In addition to the deepening the social history of gay Sydney, which has until now focussed on gay-run entertainment venues, clubs and activist organisations, the research conducted by the HDR will investigate overlaps between wealthy, bohemian and gay milieux. It will also be crucial in establishing the wider context of Broadhurst’s wallpaper business, providing detail on Broadhurst’s peers and competitors, such as Marion Hall Best, whose client list included Patrick White and other celebrated cultural figures.

This project will contribute to the growing scholarly literature on gay domestic style and world-making. Depending on the interest and skillset of the applicant, oral history dimensions may be included in the project brief, as might engagement with the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Business Association, which was founded in 1980, as well as council records and other material held by the City of Sydney Archives.

Please contact the supervisors to discuss other ideas you might have based on your own interests and expertise.

The larger project considers the extent to which the Sydney-based designer and businesswoman, Florence Broadhurst (1899 – 1977), was in step with wider cultural changes that have now coalesced into the global creative economy against which Australia measures its own success. Broadhurst is well-known as a serial self-inventor in times of social change. This project will consider Broadhurst’s self-invention as a crucial component of economic enterprise and innovation. The larger project has three main aims:

  1. Creative Entrepreneur: To explore autodidacticism as it developed across the twentieth century in vocational and entrepreneurial contexts through the singular biography of an international cultural celebrity whose career prefigured many of the themes of the creative and knowledge economy.
  2. Design Originality: To use the unusual course of Florence Broadhurst’s career—a series of self-educative initiatives followed by one that was widely acclaimed as original—to explore basic questions about the relationship between innovation, attribution, and monetization
  3. Modernising Australian Society: To provide a deeper historical perspective on Australian initiatives and design signatures across established and emerging industry and media domains, to understand the relations among self-education, celebrity, and design in a modernising society.

This project will fill a gap in our knowledge about a time in Sydney’s history that has had an enormous influence on contemporary Australia, but to which historians have paid little serious attention to date. Broadhurst hobnobbed with Sydney’s wealthy, worked alongside its philanthropists and socialites, and sold them an idea of style. Her market grew in tandem with the gay and bohemian Sydney of the late 1960s and1970s. Her career as a designer illuminates the changes in the sensibility of Australia’s elite from the end of the Menzies era, a time that also saw significant changes in the social status of gay men and recognition of their world-building capacities.

The successful applicant will join a high-calibre team of researchers actively engaged in cultural history, design history and sexuality studies. In this project we turn our historical and theoretical focus to transnational modernity and the role mass culture plays in democratising and internationalising social forms previously subject to gatekeeping via class or education or gender. Professor Chris Hilliard (History) has expertise investigating issues of cultural literacy and access to cultural capital. Associate Professor Lee Wallace (Film Studies) has worked on the intersection of sexuality, media, and celebrity. Dr Jesse Adams Stein (School of Design, UTS) is a leading Australian design historian. Between them, they can expertly supervise a range of archival and theoretical methodologies. As scoped in their current Discovery Project application, they envisage the larger project producing a co-edited anthology of original essays on Australia’s creative economy. The PhD candidate will contribute to this publication and be involved in its preparation. In addition to our track record as supervisors whose students publish and progress within the expanded research landscape, we are known for our scholarly excellence, mentoring capacity and ARC engagement. We have capacity to take on more than one HDR student if competitive candidates come forward.

The PhD project aligns with the Faculty’s emerging strength in sexuality studies. Other projects underway within FASS include the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies, to be launched in sync with Mardi Gras and Sydney WorldPride in February 2023, and CLOAK, an interdisciplinary project led by Wallace that brings together LGBTQ scientists and fashion designers in the production of bespoke lab coats in order to investigate the identity conferring aspects of social visibility for LGBTQI+ people working in STEM disciplines.

Applicants are invited to submit a proposal for PhD research that aligns directly to this project.

Prospective candidates may qualify for direct entry into the PhD program if their research proposal (see above) is accepted and they satisfy at least one of the criteria listed below.

  • Bachelor's degree with first- or second-class honours in an appropriate area of study that includes a research thesis based on primary data not literature review
  • Master's degree by research in an appropriate area of study that includes a research thesis that draws on primary data
  • Master's degree by coursework, with a research thesis or dissertation of 12,000–15,000 words that draws on primary data not literature review, with a grade-point average of at least 80 per cent in the degree.
  • Demonstrated appropriate professional experience and alternative qualifications in the field of study.

For more information regarding applying for a PhD refer to the course details for Doctor of Philosophy (Arts and Social Sciences).

Please also refer to guidelines for preparing a research proposal.

A number of scholarships are available to support your studies.

Australian Government RTP Scholarship (Domestic)
Australian Government RTP Scholarship (International)
University of Sydney International Strategic Scholarship

These scholarships will provide a stipend allowance of $35,629 per annum for up to 3.5 years. Successful international students will also receive a tuition fee scholarship for up to 3.5 years.

For other scholarship opportunities refer to FASS Research Scholarships (Domestic) or FASS Research Scholarships (International).

For further details about the PhD project contact Lee Wallace, lee.wallace@sydney.edu.au

Image: Florence Broadhurst. Photograph by Lewis Morley, 1975. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.