As the shimmering view of Sydney Harbour poured through the windows of the luxurious split-level home in Potts Point, its small, flame-haired occupant sat inside, visibly shaken. The two friends who'd come to comfort her were shocked at what they saw. They'd only ever known this formidable 59 year old as a confident, seemingly unflappable high-society businesswoman, yet the creature in front of them looked broken. Her husband had left her for a woman one third her age and, despite her opulent lodgings, she was broke. "I don't know what I'm going to do," she wailed, lamenting that a tenant in another property she owned with her errant husband wasn't making enough to pay his rent. "I have no money."

One of the shoulders she was crying on belonged to pioneering design teacher Phyllis Shillito, who hit on a solution. The struggling tenant, Shillito told her friend, had a wallpaper business. "What you do," said Shillito, "is help him get that business going." As her friends left, the woman mulled over the idea with increasing enthusiasm. She knew nothing about the industry, but so what? Who better to take on the challenge than someone who'd started life on a Queensland farm, masqueraded in London as a flamboyant French couturier, and who now had Sydney's socialites fooled into believing she was part of the British upper class? Who better than Florence Broadhurst?

What happened next reinvigorated Australian interior design and turned Broadhurst into one of the world's most famous wallpaper designers. By sheer force of personality, utter determination and a canny sense of who to sell to, she turned her tenant's sputtering business into a dynamic, high-end design studio. For almost 20 years after that fateful day in 1959, it catapulted hundreds of images on to the international market.

Her handprinted creations adorned walls around the globe during the '60s and '70s - their patterns spanning everything from psychedelic geometrics and intricate European tapestries to cartoon kangaroos. After a hiatus of almost 30 years, Broadhurst's designs reappeared in 2000, fuelling a wallpaper renaissance that's still going strong.

Today, vintage Broadhurst designs coat the interiors of nightclubs including Sydney's Ladylux, Mister Goodbar and Tank; London's iconic nightspot Madame Jojo's and Harvey Nichols department store; plus the Parisian salon of celebrity hairdresser Christophe Robin. Stella McCartney was given the energetic "Horses Stampede" print as a wedding present. Marc Jacobs, Drew Barrymore and Carly Simon are all devotees.

But however arresting her designs, the woman behind them was infinitely more colourful. This year marks the 32nd anniversary of her death - possibly at the hands of one of Australia's most notorious serial killers - in a savage murder that remains unsolved.

Broadhurst had always been an enigma. Her chameleon-like existence saw her repeatedly change her name and nationality. She moved country and continent, and morphed from dancer to dressmaker before finally becoming a designer - despite having no experience, no training and questionable eyesight. "I live in perpetual amazement at the gullibility of my fellow creatures," she once said, quoting author HG Wells.

She fooled a lot of people for a long time, largely by virtue of her unshakable demeanour, her haughty presence, and her love of theatrics. "She didn't give you the time to speak," recalls Australian designer Peter Travis, one of many peers who found Broadhurst's personality overwhelming, and who disliked her intensely. "She sort of mumbled, but she created awe in people because she had this deep voice, and she had a presence of total confidence."

Broadhurst was in her 60s before she found serious success. From 1960, her factory - in a shed behind a second-hand car yard on Sydney's north shore - produced more than 500 wallpaper designs, hand drawn to her exacting specifications by a young, talented, overworked and often underpaid staff, cowed by her imperiousness and seduced by her va-va-voom. "She just radiated energy," remarks Paulene Graham, a former employee who first met Broadhurst - wearing skin-tight orange pants and lime green plastic shoes - when she went for a job at the factory, aged 15. Graham was too petrified to ask her new boss what her salary was. She later found it only barely covered her train fares. But if you were young and artistic, you wanted to be a part of Broadhurst's world.

Her factory was a magnet for the hip and avant-garde. It was crowded and frantic, with music blaring from a radio while artists and printers worked side by side. The floor was greasy with turpentine and the fumes overwhelming, but there was always something going on - celebrities popping in, parties being held. And the boss was a blast.

"She was just such a naughty woman - she loved young men," marvels another of her artists, Sally Fitzpatrick, who watched in awe one evening as Broadhurst - by then in her 70s - seduced a boyish young pilot for a one-night stand. "I've had a fabulous weekend," Broadhurst would announce to staff when she turned up on Monday mornings, her scarlet eyelashes askew. "Now can you fix me up?"

Florence Broadhurst's life began with far less dazzle. Born on July 28, 1899 and raised near the isolated Queensland copper mining town of Mount Perry, her parents were poor but hardworking. When it became clear that Florence, the third of four surviving children, had a fine contralto voice, they made sure it was nurtured. Broadhurst first experienced the thrill of public recognition as a teenager during local charity performances. By the early '20s, she was singing professionally, joining a vaudeville group, the Smart Set Diggers, who were about to tour Asia as the Globe Trotters. Broadhurst realised she could sing her way not just out of the bush, but also out of Australia. It was around this time she began blurring the lines between fact and fantasy.

Leaving Brisbane for Singapore by steamship in 1922, she called herself "Bobby Broadhurst". The name change was a symptom of deeper motives. "Florence" was a farmer's daughter from a small country town, but "Bobby" was an ingenue with the world at her feet.

As Bobby, she became a roaring '20s flapper - the new breed of woman who could dance, vote and work her way up in the world. In China in 1926, she launched her first business, the Broadhurst Academy - a finishing school in Shanghai that offered the daughters of wealthy Western expats lessons in elocution, journalism, dancing and banjo playing. Exhibiting a brilliant eye for talent, she assembled a group of teachers who either specialised in subjects like classical music, or who could help her muddle through. But the glory days of colonial Shanghai were coming to an end. Broadhurst shed Bobby, closed her academy and foxtrotted back to Queensland. Then, in October 1927, she left Brisbane for London, where she plunged into the social scene and married 34-year-old stockbroker Percy Kann two years later.

By the early '30s, Broadhurst was turning reinvention into an art form. She and Kann co-founded a business called Pellier Ltd. While marriage had given Broadhurst a new surname, she didn't use it - masquerading instead as Madame Pellier, a chic French couturier who ran a New Bond Street fashion salon. Madame Pellier offered expert assistance to the woman of refinement, dressing the rich and famous, including concert pianist Harriet Cohen. Despite initial success, the business failed in 1936, mired in a dispute with another fashion house over whether Pellier had stolen its client list.

Broadhurst split with Kann and met another Londoner, fruit merchant Leonard Lloyd Lewis, who knew her as both Madame Pellier and Florence. "I was a good-looking 23 and Florence was a glamorous 36," he said. "It was like a young man meeting a film star ... From that moment, I didn't leave her side for 26 years." Broadhurst had her only child, Robert, with Lewis in 1938, and although they never married, they lived as husband and wife until their "divorce" in 1961.

In 1947, after playing the part of a dutiful wartime wife, Broadhurst discovered that Lewis was having an affair. She forced the family to move to Australia, hitting Sydney with a fictionalised history. Using the name Mrs Broadhurst, she introduced herself to society as an aristocratic English artist who was visiting the colonies to recuperate from the ravages of World War II. She dropped hints to the press that Winston Churchill was a fan of her work. Her family in Queensland was appalled - but never spoke out to embarrass her.

Broadhurst wanted to be "ambassadress" of Australia, and publicly launched a competition to establish a national dress. The plans didn't come to much, but she turned herself into a society darling - her apparent connections with the royal family (also fictitious) helped considerably. She promoted herself as a fundraiser and businesswoman with artistic leanings, but, in reality, she made money running a trucking company and car yard with Lewis in the city's north.

Lewis not only went along with Broadhurst's charades, but allowed her to fictionalise him, too. She told reporters he was variously a "financier" and a "business tycoon". He began hyphenating his surname into Lloyd-Lewis.

Peter Travis noticed that Lewis seemed increasingly insignificant beside Broadhurst, who became quite dismissive of him, telling friends she would "put him to bed" so she could paint. It came as no surprise to Travis when Lewis finally left Broadhurst for a woman in her 20s in 1959. Travis didn't trust Broadhurst, describing her as "too dangerous not to have as a friend because she was an opportunist". And when Broadhurst took over the fledgling wallpaper business of John Lang - the young tenant who was struggling to pay his rent - Travis noted Lang faded into the background, too. He was a shy young artist who'd created a few designs but who, as Broadhurst emphatically told him, had no idea about colour, taste, marketing or clientele. Before Lang knew it, he was working for her at Australian (Hand-Printed) Wallpapers, as Broadhurst began weaving the mystique of her defining incarnation.

As a wallpaper designer, she took the bright hues of the experimental '60s and '70s and magnified them, creating retina-crunching pastiches of bright pinks, fluorescent yellows and racy greens. She used metallic foils and printed on fabric and glass for wealthier clients. Her wallpapers were exported to Asia, the US, Europe and Saudi Arabia. By 1972, Broadhurst was an internationally recognised talent.

She instructed her artists to conjure a wild wallpaper universe inspired by her travels, treasures and personal aesthetic. If a design wasn't executed to her precise specifications, Broadhurst forced reworks until she was happy.

Media personality Jeanne Little adored her. "She was the most inspirational person I have ever met," notes Little, who recalls Broadhurst using wallpaper paint as eyeshadow when the whim took her. "[A] wild fashion icon." She did have some critics, though. John McPhee, who became the National Gallery of Australia's first curator of Australian decorative arts, considered Broadhurst part of the "flash trash" that flooded Sydney. Even so, she was racking up orders at home and abroad.

Broadhurst was at the top of her game, and had just secured a large contract with a Queensland developer, when everything came to a sudden, sickening end. On Saturday October 15, 1977, Broadhurst, 78, had been at her showroom and was closing up around 3.30pm. Someone who knew their way around let themselves in, grabbed a piece of timber from the factory, and went upstairs to the showroom. The killer bludgeoned Broadhurst over the head and neck before positioning her body around a toilet seat, where police later found it. The killer had let themselves out with a key, but, despite an extensive investigation, the case was never solved.

Strangely, the most likely candidate wasn't questioned early on. Sydney pie salesman John Wayne Glover, who shot to infamy in the early '90s as a serial murderer dubbed the Granny Killer, was a friend of Broadhurst's whom police had never thought to interview. The manner of her demise fitted his modus operandi. He bludgeoned elderly women to death and sometimes arranged their corpses in lurid poses. When he was finally questioned by police about the murder, shortly before he hanged himself in prison in 2005, Glover denied he knew her. When it was pointed out there were photos of him chatting to her, he relented. He had forgotten, he claimed.

For a while it seemed Broadhurst's pizazz had died with her. Her son, Robert, who'd had a difficult relationship with his mother, did everything he could to keep her business going. But the emotional stress of working where Broadhurst had been murdered took its toll. After two years, he sold off her artwork and silk screens. Against the odds they survived, languishing in a dusty corner of the company that bought them, until New Zealand entrepreneur David Lennie, of Sydney's Signature Prints, took control and gradually reintroduced her patterns to the world.

Fashion designer Akira Isogawa was one of the first to fall once more under Broadhurst's spell after Lennie gave him an exclusive viewing of the entire archive. Isogawa found the work powerful, beautiful and idiosyncratic. To him, Broadhurst is "a very important figure in Australia to be acknowledged". Renowned Australian director Gillian Armstrong also recognised Broadhurst's contribution with her 2006 film Unfolding Florence, starring Judi Farr.

It seems Florence Broadhurst had always known she'd be remembered. At 15, she wrote a school paper that read like a mantra. "I shall do great things," it began. "I will fail and in failing I will try again. I will fall and in falling, climb...I shall do great things."