The last recorded interviews of prominent celebrity cook Bernard King have been obtained by the State Library of Queensland in its bid to celebrate the diversity of the state's identities.
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King, who "broke a lot of ground in the entertainment industry" as a gay performer, recorded the interviews shortly before his death in 2002 and now the library is working to make the recordings available to the public.
He was born to a farming family in Maleny in the Sunshine Coast hinterland and attended Christian Brothers College at Nudgee before becoming an English teacher.
The flamboyant entertainer performed in amateur theatre productions before he went on to forge his career in television, becoming the star of his own 30-minute cooking segment King's Kitchen as well as securing a regular appearance on Ten's Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton.
The theatrical Queenslander went on to judge on daytime television talent shows and made numerous public appearances hosting cooking demonstrations.
In the weeks before King died in the garden of his Gold Coast home in 2002, his biographer Stephanie Clifford-Smith managed to record several days' worth of interviews with the Queensland star.
John Oxley Library senior librarian Brian Randall said those tapes were donated to the library in June and were an oral history of King's life.
"He talks about his life and his career, how he got into showbusiness, how he got into television, his career as a celebrity on TV with his cooking shows and his role as judge on cooking shows," Mr Randall said.
"He was very interested in cooking, it gave him a platform to show those skills and his theatrical entertainment side. He was able to do that in a way that was entertaining to people, they enjoyed seeing it on television.
"In many ways he was an innovator and a leader, a first in many ways and a very well known person."
Known for some "out there" recipes – think fish poached in soft drink, rice and peas in pineapple jelly or legs of lamb cooked in instant coffee – King had a way of resonating with his audience.
"He was a bit out there, he was larger than life, he was able to entertain in that way," Mr Randall said.
"He had a flamboyant lifestyle, loved show business and was able to project that larger-than-life image and people loved it."
The audio files will be digitised by the library's Queensland Memory team, and will be available online in the coming months.
Queensland Memory executive manager Gavin Bannerman said the audio would contribute to King's legacy.
"Having looked at the Wikipedia entry for Bernard King, we saw that definitive sources on his life were rare, which seems an anomaly given how visible he was, how important he was for the TV industry," he said.
"I think everyone knows he was flamboyant and gay, he broke a lot of ground in the entertainment industry in TV, he was very entrepreneurial.
"His anonymity towards end of life, living on the Gold Coast, are far removed from his earlier life."
Mr Bannerman said the collection would benefit everyone, from those who had watched the television celebrity to those who knew very little of the star.
"I am a good witness test for people who don't know much about him," he said.
"I am 34 years old and didn't really watch commercial TV at home so I have never been exposed, he is not like a known quantity to me.
"The fame element is not the part that attracts me, it's the outsider element that attracts me to his story.
"The fact that he didn't grow up in Sydney but then went to the big cities to make his name, that gave him that different perspective, he came to it from outside.
"If he talks about the gay clubs in Sydney and Brisbane at the time or if he talks about what it was like to be a gay man in showbusiness at the time, then there are actual touch points to people's lives through that.
"To me they are points in the past but to others it's a point in history that they still carry with them."
The digitised collection will be available on the State Library of Queensland website in the coming week.
