Esther La Rovere
Esther La Rovere was born to Italian parents. Her mother Vita moved to Silverton from Sicily, via WA, in the 1950s. Her grandmother told a story of arriving in a dust storm at Silverton station. The scene reminded her, she said, of the inferno del diavolo, ‘the inferno of the devil’. Esther’s grandparents had come to the far west to take up a poultry farm with their young children. Her grandfather brought the eggs into Broken Hill to sell and her grandmother was a seamstress who loved, and was inventive with, vintage fabrics, a passion that Esther inherited from her.
Esther’s Italian father Gino came to Broken Hill as a young man from an immigration camp in Tasmania. He was a carpenter, and also a champion a racing car driver in the 1960s, but an accident put an end to this dream. He heard that housing was in short supply in Broken Hill, and that there was plenty of work for builders.
Esther’s mother was working in the fruit & veg store that her father would often come into, to mysteriously buy a whole cabbage (her mother thought he must already have a family), and this was the beginning. Later Gino bought the historic Globe Timber Mill, a hardware business that is still in the family. It was here that Esther picked up some practical skills that would later become very useful (in spite of a short-lived career as her father’s apprentice that consisted largely sweeping the workshop floors), and where she decided that there was no mystery to taking on large projects and, when it comes to making things, it doesn’t matter what gender you are.
Originally interested in studying tourism after work experience at the Tourist Information Centre, Esther ended up studying for a business degree in Adelaide which, she realised, wasn’t for her. When she returned to Broken Hill in the late 90s for a spell, she saw the town differently, and met people who were coming to the far west to start a new life. She became more interested in the arts and took a Fine Art degree in Newcastle, started a psychedelic rock band and, for the next seven years, toured and recorded. By 2006 this evolved into running workshops and doing performance art in central Newcastle with a community of musicians and performance artists known as the Lovelorn Living Party.
After spending a summer or two working on the festival circuit in the U.K., and travels in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, Esther was on a bus on the way to a Vipassana course in India when she got a phone call from her sister Selina asking her if she would come back to Broken Hill and be her business partner in managing the historic Palace Hotel on Argent Street.
Esther returned to Broken Hill in 2009 and remembers being drawn to the idea of decorating all the rooms at the hotel, a project that she is only just starting now. The Palace had been closed for two years and needed a big makeover. The reopening happened in stages and the Palace Hotel didn’t fully launch its new life until 2015, the year that the first, and now famed, Broken Heel Festival was held. The Festival now annually celebrates the fabulous culture of the drag queen, inspired by the setting it provided for the filming of the iconic The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in 1996, in which the Palace Hotel had a starring role. Meanwhile the Palace has slowly been returned to its full glory as Esther oversees the decorating of each room as an individual and artistically-imagined space
The Palace Hotel has a rich history of its own. It was originally built as a coffee house by a temperance movement group. It was a soldier’s hostel 1917-1946, and there’s a secret basement entrance that was once an access point for miners to enter the hotel from an underground shaft. It also holds Australia’s all year-round two-up license and is on the National Heritage Register.
Who better to reimagine and preserve a place that has immense historical and cultural significance in Broken Hill, than someone with Esther la Rovere’s talent, sense of style, and ability to think expansively and adventurously.
Audio transcript available.